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Studiocanal launched a brand new official podcast – and the host might just be familiar to Film Stories listeners.

This is a bit of an odd story for me to write. Basically, well, because I’m in it. I’ll see how I get on.

The rather fine folks at Studiocanal have launched an official podcast, digging into the huge archive of movies under its stewardship. It’s arriving regularly, and as well as focusing on a movie of the month, there’s a broader exploration of other bits and bobs too.

Don’t take our word for it. Here’s Jamie McHale, the head of theatrical marketing at the studio: “We’re thrilled to be launching an official podcast to celebrate our incredible library of titles and upcoming theatrical releases. The in-depth analysis and regular features such as “Dream Double Bills” and “Hidden Gems” from Simon and his guests are...

When film historians speak of the first screenings of Louis Lumière’s “The Arrival of a Train,” they describe the Paris audience flinching in their seats to avoid being struck by the image of a locomotive rushing toward them on screen. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it makes me wonder how those who attended the 1971 premiere of James Bidgood’s iconic queer classic “Pink Narcissus” must have reacted to its, er, climactic moment.

A gauzy, softcore reimagining of Disney’s “Fantasia,” with well-endowed (live-action) hustlers in place of dancing cartoon hippos, “Pink Narcissus” unspools like some kind of erotic visual concerto. Ogling his rough-trade star Bobby Kendall, as the muscular young man admires his own ephemeral beauty reflected in countless mirrors, Bidgood stacks one super-saturated sexual fantasy upon another until such point that the film can’t contain itself any longer, erupting directly into the camera — and by extension,...

François Ozon’s “When Fall is Coming” starts simply enough. Crunchy leaves and pumpkin soup characterize daily rituals as the air turns crisp in the quaint Burgundy valley where Michelle (Hélène Vincent) lives. One rainy afternoon, the kindly octogenarian — wrapped in a warm leopard print jumper — stops pottering around and sinks into her favorite chair to call her daughter. But after fall comes winter, and already a frosty undercurrent between mother and daughter suggests that there’s more to this perpetual autumn than meets the eye.

Ozon is a filmmaker as regular and reliable as the seasons themselves, yet France’s most prolific auteur is far from predictable, and the same is true of his latest annual release. Following the campery of last year’s “The Crime is Mine” and his tragicomic reworking of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Peter von Kant,” Ozon is in a more pensive mood with this mellow autumn-core affair.

To celebrate the release of In a Year Of 13 Moons on DVD and Blu-Ray for the very first time in the UK from March 24, we are giving away 2 Blu-Rays!

Made in response to the suicide of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lover Armin Meier, In A Year Of 13 Moons is a story of unrequited love, a tortured past and a heart-wrenching search for acceptance.

written and directed by the ground-breaking German director, The film features one of cinema’s first transgender heroines, movingly portrayed by Volker Spengler in a challenging role that critics have faulted due to Fassbinder’s harsh and uncompromising approach to the character. Joining Spengler in the cast are frequent collaborators Gottfried John and, one-time wife of Fassbinder, Ingrid Caven.

In A Year Of 13 Moons traces the final days in the life of Elvira (Spengler), a transgender woman spurned by her former lover, as she reaches out desperately for understanding.

When it comes to biopics, they are usually centered around either people who are already famous or unsung heroes. You need to be part of a war, someone who has moved mountains to get to the love of your life, or made some insane scientific breakthrough to be on the radar of budding or established filmmakers. If somebody has written a book, or even an article, about an individual’s adventures, and if that has reached enough people to generate some kind of interest, then they have a good chance of getting their life story turned into a movie or a TV show. If not, well, you’ll be considered insignificant. But have you ever been to a roadside cafe, the movie theater, or just the common space in your colony and encountered someone who has lived a long life filled with adventures that are unbelievable enough to enthrall you?...

About eight or so years back, my dad started forgetting things. It was harmless at first, like losing an item he thought he’d put somewhere, but then it became more worrying. He’d get lost on his way home from work — a route he’d taken countless times before — and would have lapses where he could no longer recall names or where he was and what he was doing. As a doctor, he knew something wasn’t right, but other medical professionals failed to diagnose it as anything other than typical cognitive decline. He was in his 70s after all.

But as Covid hit and time moved on, it only got worse. His whole body started exhibiting signs of deterioration, ranging from hand tremors to his gait becoming lumbered. Finally, around two years ago, a name could be put to this cruelty: Parkinson’s with Lewy Body dementia. If this sounds familiar to some,...

Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

by James Cameron-wilson

The career and reputation of Douglas Sirk has undergone many mutations. Famous for directing lush melodramas in the 1950s, he was dismissed and belittled by many contemporary critics, until seeing a revival of sorts in the 1970s sparked by European writers and filmmakers, in particular Jean-Luc Godard and then subsequently by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Later on, many notable directors doffed their hat to Sirk and paid homage to his 1950s’ soap operas, including Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, John Waters, Lars von Trier and in particular Todd Haynes, with his sumptuous imitation Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore. When the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro accepted his Oscar for The Shape of Water, he even name-checked Douglas Sirk as an inspiration.

Sirk, the son of Danish parents, made his breakthrough as a stage director in 1920s’ Germany and then, when filmmakers...

German actress Hanna Schygulla delivered a powerful criticism of nationalism and far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) at the Berlinale today.

“We have to get away from this nationalistic thing,” said Schygulla, speaking at the press conference for Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Competition title Yunan. “It has only brought tears, wars, people being abused. All this shouldn’t be at stake anymore.

“Now we have the worst people in charge of the world. I feel quite impotent,” continued Schygulla, in a speech that lasted around eight minutes. “Everything in life is in movement, so maybe they will move out at some time – I hope.

Renowned Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke held a masterclass during Fica Vesoul, offering insights into his journey, the evolution of independent cinema in China, and the socio-political role of filmmaking. Known for capturing the realities of contemporary China, Jia spoke candidly about his early influences, creative challenges, and his vision for the future of cinema.

From VHS Tapes to Independent Filmmaking

Jia’s passion for cinema began in his school years, watching films in small VHS cabins outside the official circuit. This early exposure to Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema, including King Hu, Johnny To, and Ann Hui, shaped his cinematic sensibilities. However, his true awakening came in 1991 when he watched Chen Kaige‘s “Yellow Earth“, a film that revealed to him how cinema could express social reality beyond traditional storytelling.

His first feature, “Xiao Wu”, was made without script approval or official authorization—a defining moment in his commitment to independent filmmaking.

German movies of the 1970s will forever be linked with the New German Cinema movement, the auteur directors — led by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff — who shook the country out of its postwar stupor. “Papa’s Kino ist tot” (‘Papa’s cinema’s is dead’) was their motto, and they held radical new visions of what movies could do.

But alongside this art house wave, ’70s Germany also was a breeding ground for a cruder, more commercial strain of cinema, one that took inspiration from sexploitation and spaghetti Westerns, biker films and grindhouse horror and grafted it onto the zeitgeist-y themes of political upheaval and sexual liberation. The Berlinale pays tribute to this seldom-seen oeuvre of German genre cinema in its 2025 retrospective, which features 15 titles — cult classics and curios from both East and West Germany — that prove that German film could also be “wild,...

If the four-year gap between Frank Ocean’s debut studio album Channel Orange and his follow-ups Endless and Blonde felt long, it’s now been over double the wait to see if another album will ever materialize from the wunderkind artist. We now have a major update on Ocean’s creative output, but rather than a new album in the works, he’s started shooting his directorial debut.

Variety reports David Jonsson has landed the lead role of Ocean’s directorial debut, which Ocean also wrote and is now shooting in Mexico City. While no plot details have arrived, a bit more digging reveals the current title is Philly and shooting actually began in mid-December. As seen below, Ocean was also spotted in Mexico City this past summer shooting footage. Earlier rumors suggested A24 and Taylor Russell were involved in the project, but that has yet to be confirmed.

It...

Christoph Schlingensief's The German Chainsaw Massacre has arrived on streaming for the very first time after languishing for decades as an infamous but obscure film. The imaginatively disgusting film frantically allegorizes the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall as a kind of grindhouse horror. Instead of fighting off a deranged group of redneck cannibals (as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), The German Chainsaw Massacre follows an East German fugitive who, fleeing to the West after stabbing her husband, falls into the hands of a tribe of incestuous cannibals inhabiting a dilapidated factory. The streaming release announcement notes:

"Called 'one of the greatest artists who ever lived' by Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, Schlingensief — who died in 2010 at age 49 — was a multi-hyphenate whirling dervish of chaotic creative energy and relentless provocation, the inheritor of the mantle of German cinema’s foremost enfant terrible left...

For many horror fans, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is the most anticipated movie of 2024, perhaps even of the decade so far. It has had a troubled history with many fits and starts along the way before finally reaching screens after nearly a decade in the making (Bloody Disgusting first reported on an Eggers helmed Nosferatu in July of 2015) this Christmas Day. There is much at stake and there are big shoes to fill for this movie but if the pre-release buzz is any indication, the film may well exceed its monumental expectations.

The history of Nosferatu reaches back over one hundred years and is one of the greatest and most consistent of all horror legacies. Ostensibly retellings of Dracula, the major Nosferatu films become something unique from the world’s most famous vampire with far more sinister underpinnings than the majority of “official” Dracula stories. Nosferatu in all its forms leans into the ideas of plague,...

Holiday horror is a special subgenre all its own, full of famous films from the scandal-stirring Silent Night, Deadly Night, to Art the Clown's festive turn in Terrifier 3. The image of an evil Santa Claus has become iconic over the years, but his first — and best — starring role is in the incomparable Christmas Evil. This personal favorite of John Waters is constantly surprising, right up to its genuinely shocking twist ending.

While many holiday horror movies settle for a homicidal villain in a red and white suit, Christmas Evil has an antihero who is so obsessed with Saint Nick that he fully transforms into the jolly old elf, bringing cheer to the nice and slaughtering the naughty. The movie's startling mix of slasher movie depravity and yuletide fantasy thrilled the director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, and this John Waters-approved oddity should become a new Christmas tradition for cult film fans.

His name is Lee … Bill Lee. A man slouching toward middle age and suffering the malaise of someone who’s seen it all, heard it all, shot it all into his veins, he’s embraced the dissolute life of an ex-pat. Sporting an endless supply of filthy linen suits and ever-present fedoras, Lee cruises the bars looking to score sex and junk in Mexico. Sweaty afternoons are spent buzzed on cheap tequila and bantering with his fellow social outcasts. Evenings are spent in the company of willing young men and needles.

“In Another Country,” “Claire’s Camera,” and now “A Traveler’s Needs” — Isabelle Huppert and Hong Sang-soo are three for three in conjuring one of contemporary cinema’s most psychically in-sync pairings. Hong, who has directed more than 30 films dating back to his 1996 debut “The Day a Pig Fell into the Well,” is a tireless achiever and one could say workaholic at the level of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, often releasing two films a year. While the sun-dappled and deceptively light “A Traveler’s Needs,” his loveliest and funniest film in years, debuted at the Berlinale in February, Hong already had “By the Stream” heading for Locarno this past summer.

In “A Traveler’s Needs,” which shot in under two weeks on location in Seoul, Huppert plays a drifting tourist named Iris who funds her walkabout by teaching French and piano lessons to locals. She gets by on the largesse of others — including a younger man she’s staying with,...

In 1828, a young man wandered the streets of Nuremberg, Germany. He was shoddily dressed, spoke very little, and only carried with him a handwritten note and prayer book. The person, later identified as Kaspar Hauser, attested to having spent his formative years locked in a dungeon and only being fed bread and water. One of many foundlings, or abandoned children, Hausers life has been one shrouded in mystery ever since and was brought to light in 1974 by director Werner Herzog in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

One of the main figures in the New German Cinema Movement alongside R.W. Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, Herzogs approach to directing has been one that challenges the medium and seeks out images that are beyond convention. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser embodies many of the traits that have been synonymous with Herzog throughout his career.

The documentary-like approach to narrative film, which he had...

One of European cinema’s most distinctive, fearless and tireless narrative and documentary filmmakers, Eckhart Schmidt, died of natural causes at his home in Munich on Oct. 24, only a few days before his 86th birthday.

His best-known film, the psychological horror thriller, “The Fan,” was graphic and shocking when it premiered in 1982, and its stomach-churning tale of a cannibalistic groupie was influential on a generation of horror filmmakers, but the film didn’t achieve mass commercial success upon its initial release.

Banned in several territories for its jarring, bloody portrait of a rock star-obsessed teenager, in the past decade the film has undergone a global rediscovery, popping up in sold-out screenings at film festivals (like Thessaloniki in 2019) and a social media obsession to match its heroine’s zeal (but thankfully not her savagery).

Before his multi-disciplinary career in the visual arts, Schmidt worked as a film critic for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung,...

The world premiere of David Dietl’s Long Story Short will open the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (Poff) on November 8.

It is one of 15 new German films as part of a focus programme on Germany at this year’s festival.

Long Story Short is a comedy drama about the parties, tragedies, love and friendship experienced by a close group of friends. German stars Laura Tonke and Ronald Zehrfeld are among the cast. With a script by Elena Senft, it is adapted from May el-Toukhy’s 2015 Danish feature of the same name.

Dietl’s film is produced by Quirin Berg,...

The world premiere of David Dietl’s Long Story Short will open the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (Poff) on November 8.

It is one of 15 new German films as part of a focus programme on Germany at this year’s festival.

Long Story Short is a comedy-drama about the parties, tragedies, love and friendship experienced by a close group of friends. German stars Laura Tonke and Ronald Zehrfeld are among the cast. With a script by Elena Senft, it is adapted from May el-Toukhy’s 2015 Danish feature of the same name.

Dietl’s film is produced by Quirin Berg,...

Above: Official poster by Yves Tinguely for the 12th New York Film Festival in 1974.The twelfth edition of the New York Film Festival, which took place 50 years ago this week, in September 1974, could have been convincingly called the New York European Film Festival. Out of the seventeen new feature films playing, all but two were European: seven French, three German, two Italian, two Swiss, and one British. Though festival director Richard Roud wrote in the program that “one of the most exciting developments in world cinema these past two years has been the re-emergence of the American film,” there was in fact only one American film in the main lineup (the world premiere of John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence) though there was also a program of four American shorts by Mirra Bank, Martha Coolidge, William Greaves, and an exciting upstart named Martin Scorsese. There was just one...

Animated shows geared towards mature audiences have become commonplace. These cartoons often rely on edgier humor to push the boundaries of what's considered socially acceptable. Years before South Park and others were catering to adult viewers, a short-lived animated series appealed to a different type of audience. Viewers who were familiar with the trends in mainstream entertainment and had an appreciation for directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder had a show that was perfectly suited to their interests. Brought to life through the voice of Jon Lovitz, The Critic offered intelligent humor that lampooned the film industry and spoke to the cinephile in all of us.

Streaming for free on Tubi, The Critic might have only lasted for two seasons, the first on ABC and then another on Fox, but the misadventures of Jay Sherman, a film critic based in New York City, are wildly entertaining and...

Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.The cinema is a house. Part of the beauty and potential of this house is that it is at once material and metaphorical. The projection of a film onto a screen always denotes a living space around it, whether physical walls and roof or a more nebulous zone, as outdoors under a night sky. This space is inclusive of some things and exclusive of others; its center looks different than its perimeter. The movie itself can also create a house, building within and between shots an architecture of imagination abiding by unspoken rules and formed by plans known only to its makers, whose contours, coherence, and meaning are discovered through exploration by guests. What kind of house a film forms, on what ground it was built, what keeps it together, and what it’s like to move through it are questions whose pursuit animates some of cinema’s great pleasures.

Writing and directing a series is a rite of passage for any celebrated European filmmaker — so why shouldn’t Oscar winner Thomas Vinterberg follow in the footsteps of Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder? The Danish director, who won the Best International Feature Film Oscar for “Another Round” in 2021, was in Toronto to promote his new series, “Families Like Ours,” which first premiered in Venice alongside Alfonso Cuarón’s “Disclaimer” and Joe Wright’s “M. Son of the Century.” He spoke to IndieWire about his seven-episode television show, which finds Denmark in a state of environmental collapse, flooded by rising water levels as its citizens panic toward a way out. Denmark, like everywhere else, has been hit by storm surges in recent years, so this series is all too prescient in its imagining of a widespread catastrophe that would push its people out.

Vinterberg first made an arthouse splash with...

Lee Daniels is anything but typical. He’s made sobering character studies (“Precious”), historical and political epics (“The Butler”), and even supernatural horror films (“The Deliverance”), so when it comes to his choices in the Criterion Closet, it’s not surprising to learn his range of influence would be so eclectic. Daniels himself calls the space a “candy store” at the top of his video, signaling a visit that will see him lean into his varied taste and take home selections that encompass Italian surrealism, the work of John Waters, and 1950s noir. First in the bag for Daniels was Essential Fellini, a box set that features 14 of the beloved filmmaker’s work.

“Fellini is my god, my hero,” said Daniels. “Fellini made it possible for me to think that I was a filmmaker because none of his stuff makes sense really, at the end of the day, but it does make sense.

From “Rubber” to “Wrong” to “Smoking Causes Coughing” and “The Second Act,” eccentric French auteur Quentin Dupieux is quickly becoming one of Europe’s most prolific filmmakers akin to a Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Albeit with eccentric, often fourth-wall-breaking comedies. He had two films debut at festivals in 2023, including the heckler hostage comedy “Yannick” at Locarno and the Salvador Dalí “real fake biopic” “Daaaaaalí!” out of competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. A movie where five actors play the surrealist icon, “Daaaaaalí!” is now making its way to U.S. theaters courtesy of Music Box Films, and IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer below.

Here’s the official synopsis: “For journalist Judith Rochant (Anaïs Demoustier), the assignment to interview renowned artist Salvador Dalí is a great career opportunity–if only he would agree to sit still and answer a single question. What begins as a 15-minute conversation blows up into a bonafide cinematographic documentary portrait,...

His name is Lee … Bill Lee. A man slouching toward middle age and suffering the malaise of someone who’s seen it all, heard it all, shot it all into his veins, he’s embraced the dissolute life of an ex-pat. Sporting an endless supply of filthy linen suits and ever-present fedoras, Lee cruises the bars looking to score sex and junk in Mexico. Sweaty afternoons are spent buzzed on cheap tequila and bantering with his fellow social outcasts. Evenings are spent in the company of willing young men and needles.

A monument of independent filmmaking is coming to a cinema near you. Brady Corbet’s 3.5-hour-long, seven-years-in-the-making historical epic The Brutalist finally secured a U.S. distribution deal over the weekend. The movie, which won Corbet the Venice Film Festival’s best director prize Saturday, will be released by indie tastemaker A24 sometime later this year with a major awards season campaign expected to follow.

The buzz around The Brutalist has been building into a roar ever since its first press screening in Italy a little over a week ago. First came the curious talk surrounding the 10-minute intermission that bisects the movie — a commercially challenging choice that nonetheless feels integral to its construction. Then there were excited comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, or favorable references to the works of László Nemes and Jonathan Glazer. Awards season pundits, meanwhile, have already projected the film’s star,...

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” is a meta ghost story, according to legendary author Rachel Kushner.

The California writer, whose latest novel “Creation Lake” will be released in September, appeared on the Criterion Channel’s “Adventures in Moviegoing” series to share her favorite San Francisco-set films. Of course, “Vertigo” was on the top of her list, both due to her personal connections to the locations captured by Hitchcock onscreen and just how much the 1958 film still haunts the city itself 70 years later.

The beloved thriller stars James Stewart as a former police detective who becomes obsessed with a woman (Kim Novak) he is hired to investigate. (Read our list of Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies here.)

“I find ‘Vertigo’ to be an exquisite movie,” Kushner said. “There’s this sense of holographic ghosts hovering in San Francisco and come to think of it, the holograph is an imagery that is actually...

Margaret Menegoz, the head of French production company Les Films du Losange, who produced the movies of Michael Hanke, Wim Wenders and Éric Rohmer, among others, has died. She was 83.

The company issued a statement confirming that Menegoz died in Montpellier on August 7. They cited her “love of films and work, and her loyalty to her filmmakers that have become the hallmarks of Les Films du Losange,” describing Menegoz as “open-minded towards Europe and the international scene, which she particularly cherished.”

Menegoz led Les Films du Losange for close to 50 years, taking over at the company in 1973. She produced more than 60 films, including Haneke’s Amour, The White Ribbon and Cache, Wenders’ 1977 feature The American Friend, Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love (1984), Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa (1990), Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992), among many others.

Amour received 5 Oscar nominations in 2013, including a nomination for Menegoz for best feature.

Margaret Menegoz, who led iconic French film company Les Films du Losange for close to 50 years, producing the films of Éric Rohmer, Michael Haneke and Wim Wenders among others, has died at the age of 83.

The German and French film producer was born in Hungary in 1941. Her family, which was of German origin, was expelled from the country in the wake of the 1945 Siege of Budapest, and Menegoz grew up in Germany.

Menegoz entered the film industry as an editor and then connected with the French independent filmmaking scene via her documentarian husband Robert Menegoz, who she met at the Berlin Film Festival in the early 1970s.

She took the reins of Les Films du Losange in 1975, having been originally hired as an assistant on co-founder Rohmer’s 1976 German-language film Marquise Of O, co-starring Edith Clever and Bruno Ganz.

Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder had created the company in 1962, but with...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s whirlwind career of 40-plus movies made within just over a dozen years kicked off with Love Is Colder Than Death. It ended, all too soon, with a sendoff that may as well have been called Death Is Hotter Than Love. Even if it hadn’t wound up being Fassbinder’s final cinematic will and testament, Querelle, an uber-horny but otherwise unorthodox adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest, would still feel like a film precariously perched between rowdy, profane life and that liminal, insatiable zone that always follows la petite mort.

But because the timeline spanning the film’s completion to its release was bisected by Fassbinder’s death from a drug overdose, it’s nearly impossible to avoid overlaying the gorgeously wrecked glamour of his entire career onto the film, draping the virtue of his carnal vices over a package that’s already prodigiously overstuffed.

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: Through a Glass Very, Very Darkly

If Arthur Slugworth haunted your dreams as a child, then prepare for Günter Meisner to paint your adult nightmares with a sickly blue palette in “In a Glass Cage.”

German actor Meisner played a certain beloved chocolatier’s cadaverous arch-rival in Mel Stuart’s inherently creepy “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” in 1971 — exactly 15 years before he’d play a sadomasochistic Nazi doctor in Agustí Villaronga’s post-World War II revenge picture, “In a Glass Cage,” from 1986. And here, Meisner is just as lacking in...

Run Lola Run is a turbo-charged, adrenaline-fueled thriller that also delivers a heavy dose of existentialism, determinism, and free will theory. Director Tom Tykwer's 1999 German film stars Franka Potente in the titular role alongside Moritz Bliebtreu as her troubled petty criminal boyfriend, Manni. In many ways, it is considered a game-changer for the notoriously dour and depressing culture of German film and cinema as a whole. It sets out to tell a very simple story and, along the way, indulges in some mind-bending queries that open for discussion a variety of life's most basic wonderments. For instance, is the butterfly effect a real phenomenon, and does every action we take alter the lives of those we come into contact with and the world around us? The end result is a fantastically shot late-20th-century movie that redefines the way that cinema can both tell a hell of a story...

Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.For more Cannes 2024 coverage, subscribe to the Weekly Edit newsletter.Eephus.For all the thrills that come from watching the latest film by this or that renowned auteur, I don’t come to Cannes for confirmation, but for the pleasure of discovery. And nothing quite matches the exhilaration of reckoning with a new voice—the kind that jolts you out of your festival torpor and reminds you of all the beauty and magic the cinema can muster. As usual, those epiphanies were a lot harder to come by in the official competition than in the risk-friendlier Directors’ Fortnight, an independent sidebar born in 1969 as a counterprogram dedicated, per its mission statement, “to showcasing the most singular forms of contemporary cinema.” It is here that some of the greatest have shown their earliest stuff, an illustrious pedigree that’s flaunted before each screening through a short reel...

Unlike Cannes’ industry-catered competition section, the festival’s independent sidebar Directors’ Fortnight defines itself around audience outreach.

Headquartered halfway down the Croisette, equidistant from the Palais des Festivals, where the official selection screens for an industry-only crowd, Fortnight embraces the sprawl. The 56th edition programs 21 features and another eight shorts from May 15-25 (starting with Sophie Fillières’ posthumous “This Life of Mine”) while bringing select titles to many theaters far from the main drag.

That same selection will also offer the easiest point of access for so many locals, for whom Fortnight is often synonymous with Cannes, and who can always count on a 30-minute Q&a after each screening. Further afield, however, that clarity of identity begins to fade.

For one thing, the showcase doesn’t have a recognizable pitchman. In the time since Thierry Frémaux took over the official selection in 2004, Directors’ Fortnight has seen four artistic directors come and go,...

The Art of Saying Nothing: Dupieux Deconstructs Cinema

Had Luis Bunuel approached conveying the reality of cinema produced by artificial intelligence, there may have been some similarities with what Quentin Dupieux is doing in his latest feature, Le Deuxième Acte (The Second Act). Of course, ironically, it is a film which doesn’t technically feature anything resembling a second act, and much like Dupieux’s previous films, actively disrupts notions of coherence or linear expectation. Such is the generally the blessing and curse of the perennial Dupieux, who seems to operating at the same frantic pace of someone like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, only with less of a success rate considering his strict adherence to an absurdism which suggests his films are probably more entertaining for those who made them than an audience trying to grasp at his intentions.…...

The red carpet will soon roll out for the 77th Festival de Cannes. The international film festival, playing out May 14-25, has a distinct American voice this year. “Barbie” filmmaker Greta Gerwig is the first U.S. female director name jury president. Many veteran American helmers are heading to the French Rivera resort town. George Lucas, who turns 80 on May 14, will receive an honorary Palme d’Or. Francis Ford Coppola’s much-anticipated “Megalopolis” is screening in competition, as is Paul Schrader’s “Oh Canada.” Kevin Costner’s new Western “Horizon, An American Saga” will premiere out of competition and Oliver Stone’s “Lula” is part of the special screening showcase.

Fifty years ago, Coppola was the toast of the 27th Cannes Film Festival. His brilliant psychological thriller “The Conversation” starring Gene Hackman won the Palme D’Or and well as a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury. The film would earn three Oscar nominations: picture,...

From Sergio Leone's iconic Dollars Trilogy to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Whity, European filmmakers have harbored a longtime fascination with the Western genre since it emerged in the United States shortly after the birth of cinema. Once a layout to glorify bygone days of the American West, many European filmmakers have historically used the Westerns to explore nuanced concepts around the region's mythical "taming" and settlement. In recent times, European directors have continued to use their outside perspectives to excavate the longstanding lore of the Western genre. Released in 2016, Dutch filmmaker Martin Koolhooven's Brimstone revises expected conventions to create a reinvigorated and twisted Eurowestern that begs for a revisit from any fan of the genre.

The entire film industry is soon to descend upon the Côte d’Azur this May as the Cannes Film Festival readies for its 77th edition. From May 14 through May 25, the iconic festival event of the year will host much-awaited new works for auteurs and rising directors alike, across sections like the Competition, Directors’ Fortnight, Un Certain Regard (with jury president Xavier Dolan), and Critics’ Week. Major prizes will come at the end of the festival, and will no doubt set the tone for the movie year ahead.

Such was the case last year when Justine Triet’s eventual Oscar winner “Anatomy of a Fall” took home the top award, the Palme d’Or, the fourth consecutive film distributed by Neon to do so. Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 Grand Prize winner “The Zone of Interest” also won two Academy Awards, while Competition entries “Perfect Days” and “May December” earned Oscar nominations, too.

The Criterion Collection has announced its slate of releases for June 2024, which is headlined by 4K restorations of two of the boutique label’s most popular Blu-rays and four new high profile additions to the collection.

David Lynch’s landmark 1986 neo-noir horror film, which marked his first collaboration with Laura Dern alongside her future “Twin Peaks: The Return” co-star Kyle McLachlan, will be re-released by Criterion with a new 4K transfer. It joins Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Lost Highway,” “Inland Empire,” “The Elephant Man,” and “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” in the Criterion 4K library.

Also getting the 4K treatment is Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which sees Johnny Depp playing Hunter S. Thompson stand-in Raoul Duke in a psychedelic adaptation of the landmark countercultural novel.

New additions to the collection include Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s “Bound,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Querelle,” Emilio Fernández’s “Victims of Sin,...

And I still can see blue velvet through my tears… in 4K! Surely Criterion will add an audio track in their upgrade of David Lynch’s beyond-seminal film, arriving this June in an otherwise-identical edition to 2019’s release. At least two things are arguably of greater note, though: the Wachowskis make their entrance into the Criterion Collection with a 4K edition of their debut feature Bound, while the company takes a big step into the limited-series realm with Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad.

Meanwhile, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s positively apocalyptic final feature Querelle and Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin get Blu-ray releases, while Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also gets the 4K upgrade.

See artwork below, with more at Criterion:

The post The Criterion Collection’s June Lineup Includes Blue Velvet and the Wachowskis on 4K, The Underground Railroad & More first appeared on The Film Stage.

Creo has announced the jury for the 2024 Sony Future Filmmaker Awards.

Director Justin Chadwick serves as chair for the second year in a row. He is joined on the jury by Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, co-founders and co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics; cinematographer Rob Hardy ASC, Bsc; cinematographer Kate Reid Bsc; cinematographer Robert Primes ASC; and Australian filmmaker Unjoo Moon.

Chadwick said, “It is such a pleasure to return as Chair of this new prestigious panel of decorated creatives. Last year, we brought to the forefront 30 exceptionally talented filmmakers from across the world, each of whom had the unique chance to access the inner workings of the industry in Los Angeles, opening doors to career-launching opportunities. From my own experience, the art of the short film is by no means one to be underestimated, and I look forward to discovering more brilliant, talented individuals through this upcoming selection.”

In...

German acting legend Hanna Schygulla will be honored this year with a lifetime achievement award at the German Film Awards.

Best known for her work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, including The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), and Lili Marleen (1981), Schygulla’s career has included collaborations with the likes of Wim Wenders (1975’s Wrong Move), Jean-Luc Godard (1982’s Passion) and Fatih Akin (2007’s The Edge of Heaven). More recently, the 80-year-old actress has a scene-stealing cameo in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-winner Poor Things as Martha von Kurtzroc, the eccentric woman Emma Stone’s character befriends on the cruise ship.

“Hanna Schygulla is an institution of German and European cinema,” said Alexandra Maria Lara, president of the German Film Academy, explaining the decision of the honorary jury. “Through her long-standing collaboration with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, she wrote herself into film history. She became an icon of German auteur cinema with international appeal.

Martin Scorsese was at the Berlinale this week for the first time in a decade. His presence to collect an honorary Golden Bear was a reminder of the festival’s glories of yesteryear.

In decades past, Scorsese touched down in Berlin with major works such as Raging Bull (1981), Cape Fear (1992); Gangs of New York (2003 ), Shine a Light (2008) and Shutter Island (2010). It feels a long time since the event — traditionally one of the world’s great cinema showcases — has attracted such movies. In recent years the studio splashes have dried up.

So have memorable movies from A-list arthouse filmmakers. Scorsese this week sang the praises of the event for the encouragement it had given him as an emerging filmmaker. Citing Brian de Palma’s Silver Bear win for his second film Greetings in 1969, Scorsese said the prize had marked a turning point for unknown, independent American directors such as himself, de Palma,...

Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, French writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem. Throughout, the oneiric imagery seeping from every frame takes precedence over narrative linearity. And yet, even as the film embodies the self-indulgent ideal of art for art’s sake, it devours itself from within and drops the viewer back into the arena of politics.

Lest we forget even for moment that we’re watching a film, She Is Conann is shot in black and white, aside from the sporadic flash of violence and one framing sequence set in hell’s antechamber, where a dead Conann (Françoise Brion) takes stock of her life of barbarism. For her guide, there’s the dog-headed punk clairvoyant Rainer (Elina Löwensohn), whose name could be an allusion to Rainer Maria Rilke or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Their dialogue at any given moment...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a trailblazing German filmmaker active in the 1960s and '70s. He made features for only about sixteen years, but in that time directed a whopping thirty films, plus a number of TV productions. He was also a polymath, not only writing and directing but frequently working on his movies as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer, and editor.

1974 marked the apex of the New Hollywood movement, with major works released by filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and John Cassavetes. Mel Brooks had a breakthrough year in 1974, directing the landmark comedies Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, catapulting him to the top of comedic directors of the era. Internationally, New German Cinema dominated with filmmakers like Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder premiering some of their best movies in 1974, and French directors continued the legacy of the Nouvelle Vague.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the films of 1974. In 1974, Hollywood was at the apex of the New Hollywood movement, a time in American film history when diminishing studio power led to the rise of independent auteurs. A seminal year for New Hollywood Cinema, 1974 saw major works released by filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and John Cassavetes. Comedian Mel Brooks also debuted two landmark comedies,...

Experimental French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico isn’t for everyone — i.e. an acquired taste whose visions push boundaries of cinematic expression — but he’s achieved something of a cult fandom over the last three decades. After last pairing with the director on 2022’s “After Blue” and 2017’s uninhibited Venice winner “The Wild Boys” — Cahiers du Cinéma’s top film of 2018 — the distributor Altered Innocence again teams with Mandico on another provocation. His 2023 Cannes premiere “She Is Conann,” nominated for the Queer Palm before going on to play at other festivals including Locarno, is an acid-trip transgressive riff on the Conan the Barbarian myth. IndieWire shares the trailer here.

Influences on the film include Tony Scott’s “The Hunger,” the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Liliana Cavani’s “The Night Porter,” and Fellini’s “Satyricon.” Throw Ken Russell in there for good measure, with profane images in “She Is Conann” reminiscent of “The Devils.

Mickey Cottrell, the beloved indie film publicist and producer who long championed independent cinema dating back to the early days of Sundance, has died at 79. He passed away Monday, January 1, 2024 at Motion Picture Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. The news was confirmed by his sister, Suzy Cottrell-Smith, who shared on Facebook, “My adorable, fun, critical, foodie, particular, brilliant, loving brother passed on to the next life early on New Year’s Day. He was smiling when he died. Mickey Cottrell will be missed by many.”

Many of Cottrell’s friends and colleagues shared memories of the veteran PR whiz — who also had many credits as an actor — on Facebook. Cottrell suffered a stroke in 2016, with friends and loved ones raising more than $57,000 to help with medical bills on GoFundMe. He relocated back to Los Angeles in 2019 after recovering from the stroke with his sister in Arkansas.

Cottrell was never afraid to pick up the phone,...