No major film festival is complete without at least one Love Letter To Cinema™ from a filmmaker of some renown, to advocate the joys of the medium to an audience that doesn’t have to be told twice. French writer-director and Cannes regular Arnaud Desplechin brings that to the Croisette this year with “Filmlovers!,” a duly warm and nostalgia-washed cine-valentine, but one with a little more to say than just, “Movies, amirite?” Indeed, the film’s somewhat inelegant English-language title risks concealing the more specific focus of this unassuming but winning hybrid documentary: The French title, “Spectateurs!,” makes clear this is first and foremost a celebration of spectatorship rather than filmmaking, probing the dynamics of cinema audiences and their relationship to the screen. In either language, it’s impassioned enough to earn its exclamation point.
Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber...
Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber...
- 5/29/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
For his tenth Cannes feature premiere, Arnaud Desplechin chose to present a docu-fictional love letter to cinema. Two years after Brother and Sister was in Competition, Spectateurs (or Filmlovers!) is one of the festival’s Special Screenings, an effervescent walk down memory lane with a director who has helped shape contemporary French cinema for the better. It’s not hard for a Frenchman to be a cinephile––almost everyone is trained in film knowledge, either formally or informally, as part of their cultural upbringing. But Filmlovers! manages to set itself apart from all the other meta-documentaries or essays about how cinema made their director the person they are today. Instead it is both an honest and highly poetic feature that quite naturally absorbs film and literary references to address the structural role cinema has played for both Desplechin himself and our way of viewing the world.
Filmlovers! is narrated by Paul Dédalus,...
Filmlovers! is narrated by Paul Dédalus,...
- 5/26/2024
- by Savina Petkova
- The Film Stage
Movies are hot, according to Marshall McLuhan, who wasn’t paying them a compliment but placing them within his theory of hot and cool media. He was referring to the sensory richness that makes movies such a captivating and complete experience that they require little active participation from the audience. Just sit in the dark and let the magic wash over you. Arnaud Desplechin doesn’t disagree about the magic, but he puts a different slant on things in the docufiction Filmlovers! (Spectateurs!), whose focus is the moviegoer as an essential part of the equation.
Abounding in movie love, the director’s first feature since Brother and Sister cites more than 50 films in its eloquent onrush of clips and philosophizing and memory. But, in a departure from most such cinema essays, there’s no auteur namechecking (or onscreen titles ID’ing clips); it’s not those 50 films’ making-of or even their makers that matter here,...
Abounding in movie love, the director’s first feature since Brother and Sister cites more than 50 films in its eloquent onrush of clips and philosophizing and memory. But, in a departure from most such cinema essays, there’s no auteur namechecking (or onscreen titles ID’ing clips); it’s not those 50 films’ making-of or even their makers that matter here,...
- 5/23/2024
- by Sheri Linden
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Arnaud Desplechin’s hybrid documentary “Spectateurs!” (“Filmlovers”) debuted a first trailer ahead of the film’s world premiere at Cannes on May 22.
The 88-minute docu is a love letter to cinema, inspired by Desplechin’s own discovery and passion for cinema.
Per the official Cannes description of the film, Desplechin wrote: “What does it mean, to go to the movies? Why have people been going for over one hundred years? I set out to celebrate movie theaters and their manifold magic. So, I walked in the footsteps of young Paul Dédalus, as if in a filmgoer’s coming-of-age story. Memories, fiction and discoveries come together in an irrepressible torrent of pictures.”
“Spectateurs!” weaves documentary and fiction with a cast including Milo Machado Graner, the young breakthrough actor of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” and well-known French actors Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and Françoise Lebrun...
The 88-minute docu is a love letter to cinema, inspired by Desplechin’s own discovery and passion for cinema.
Per the official Cannes description of the film, Desplechin wrote: “What does it mean, to go to the movies? Why have people been going for over one hundred years? I set out to celebrate movie theaters and their manifold magic. So, I walked in the footsteps of young Paul Dédalus, as if in a filmgoer’s coming-of-age story. Memories, fiction and discoveries come together in an irrepressible torrent of pictures.”
“Spectateurs!” weaves documentary and fiction with a cast including Milo Machado Graner, the young breakthrough actor of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” and well-known French actors Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and Françoise Lebrun...
- 5/14/2024
- by Addie Morfoot
- Variety Film + TV
She Came to Me has designs on being a grand opera, but it’s definitely more of what the British call a panto. Opening at a swanky cocktail reception as a male tenor offhandedly begins singing the famous “Habanera” from Carmen, we’re introduced to the sketchily imaged beau monde existence of one Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage), blocked opera composer extraordinaire. He’s toasting his first commission following a breakdown, through which he met and then wed his psychiatrist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), but artistic inspiration again eludes him. They enjoy a cosseted, Brooklyn townhouse-inhabiting existence, familiar from Woody Allen and earlier Noah Baumbach pictures––a hint at the weirdly dated manner of this film where lead characters are immune from the expected satire, humbling, or cross-examination, and instead indulged for unfunny farce.
Its writer-director is Rebecca Miller, who in the aftermath of New York Magazine’s infamous “nepo baby” mock-exposé,...
Its writer-director is Rebecca Miller, who in the aftermath of New York Magazine’s infamous “nepo baby” mock-exposé,...
- 2/16/2023
- by David Katz
- The Film Stage
Movie stars — remember them? Ticket to Paradise sure does, and it’s banking on the fact that you, the audience member, would actually be willing to leave the comfort of your couch and 7,200 streaming services to go see two of ’em! Together! In a romantic comedy! On a big screen, just like in the old days! By pairing George Clooney and Julia Roberts and casting them as a long-divorced couple who hate each other but must work together to sabotage their daughter’s wedding, the film requires you to answer the burning question: Wait,...
- 10/20/2022
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Twentieth CenturyA common misconception about 1930s Hollywood cinema is that escapism was the trend du jour. The ubiquity of genres like historical melodramas and musicals indicates that rationale may be true to an extent, but even the most fantastic films were grounded in some semblance of social realism. And how could they not be? With nearly one in four Americans out of work by 1933 and a slow-but-stable economic recovery stimulated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program, the bleakness of the Great Depression and the disparity between the haves and have-nots was an omnipresent thread throughout the decade’s popular culture. Like any major American industry, Hollywood was formative to the public’s perception of culture and politics, and the movies were a temperature gauge of the decade’s cultural climate.
- 1/3/2022
- MUBI
“The August Virgin” starts with a death, albeit off-screen. When Eva goes to pick up the keys to the apartment she’ll be staying in for August, the writer who lives there tells her about an article he’s been commissioned to write about the recently deceased philosopher Stanley Cavell. He explains the admiration Cavell had for the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, particularly the progressive films of Barbara Stanwyck and Katherine Hepburn, whose pictures the academic celebrated for being “about feminine identity, the courage of being oneself, knowing who you really are.” Director Jonás Trueba couldn’t have made the thesis statement for his latest feature any clearer.
Continue reading ‘The August Virgin’: A Radiant, Summery Sojourn In Madrid That Brims With Life [Review] at The Playlist.
Continue reading ‘The August Virgin’: A Radiant, Summery Sojourn In Madrid That Brims With Life [Review] at The Playlist.
- 8/19/2020
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Though his actual first name was Howard, and he signed his books “James Harvey,” in the 20-plus years of our friendship I always knew him as Jim. In our household, my wife, daughter and I also had a nickname for him, “The Owl,” because of the night hours he kept. I am a morning person, and sometimes the difference created tension between us, if, say, we were having dinner after a film and it was going on 10:30 and I could barely keep my eyes open. I would stand up to signal I was done and ready to leave while he was still nursing his espresso, just getting started, and he would get a wounded look in his eyes and let me know he thought I was being rude. It’s true, I can be abrupt, and he was the opposite, apt to make a more gradual, mannerly leave-taking. We were both great walkers,...
- 5/29/2020
- by Phillip Lopate
- Indiewire
Dušan Makavejev was born on King Milutin Street in Belgrade on October 13, 1932. This was about nine years before the city was occupied by the Nazis, at which point the Chinese embassy across the street became the headquarters of the German Chief Command of the Southeast. As a child, he watched German officers go in and out of the building, one of whom, Kurt Waldheim, would later become the Secretary of the United Nations—though of course the young Makavejev didn’t know this at the time. Following the Second World War, it was under Tito's Communist, but anti-Stalinist Yugoslavia that Makavejev first emerged as a major Eastern European filmmaker, initially associated with the loosely defined Novi Film (new film) movement. His eclectic career, the subject of a major retrospective at New York's Anthology Archives, garnered praise from the likes of Amos Vogel, Robin Wood, Stanley Cavell, Jonas Mekas, and Roger Ebert,...
- 2/27/2020
- MUBI
Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life is Mubi Go's Film of the Week of January 17, 2020.In 1979, as a response to the confusion of friends and foes alike, Stanley Cavell published an enlarged edition to his cinematic ontology book The World Viewed with an addendum aptly and sardonically called More of the World Viewed. And in the preface to this new volume appeared a prescient reading of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). Knowing full well that Malick had translated Martin Heiddeger’s The Essence of Reason years earlier, Cavell claimed that Days of Heaven evokes a particular passage from Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?, which Malick “had done only… by having discovered… a fundamental fact about film’s photographic basis: that objects participate in the photographic presence of themselves; they participate in the recreation of themselves on film; they are essential in the making of their appearances.”In the...
- 1/17/2020
- MUBI
Mubi's series Screwball Now & Then is showing November 21–December 21, 2019 in the United Kingdom.Preston Sturges was a writer and director who could pass muster as a percussionist; his deliciously black-hearted screwball comedies of the forties moved at a clip that would tongue-tie most screen performers today. Rhythm is integral to Sturges’ comedies and his characters move and speak so quickly they can get away with all kinds of things. In his beloved series of films of that decade—The Lady Eve (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero (both 1944), among others—Sturges would help to perfect a very particular form of romantic comedy. That venerated form, known as screwball, reached its apotheosis in the late 1930s and early ‘40s, characterized by sharp verbal sparring, chaotic plot twists, and snappy pacing that veered from witticism to pratfalling as it pleased. In The Palm Beach Story,...
- 11/22/2019
- MUBI
This has been one of the hottest summers on record in Madrid and the dog days of have come early, bringing with them Jonás Trueba’s steamy new feature “The August Virgin,” which world premiered in competition at Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Each August, as thermometers pass 40ºC (104ºF), Madrileños flee the Spanish capital bound for the beaches of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. “The August Virgin” turns on Eva, one of the few locals to have decided to stay and brave the city’s hottest days.
In her early-thirties and in a stage of major transition, Eva rents an apartment for the month and experiences her hometown in completely new ways thanks to a series of interactions with old friends and new acquaintances. In trying to help these people, however, she learns that she must first help herself.
The film is produced by Trueba’s Madrid-based Los Ilusos Films,...
Each August, as thermometers pass 40ºC (104ºF), Madrileños flee the Spanish capital bound for the beaches of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. “The August Virgin” turns on Eva, one of the few locals to have decided to stay and brave the city’s hottest days.
In her early-thirties and in a stage of major transition, Eva rents an apartment for the month and experiences her hometown in completely new ways thanks to a series of interactions with old friends and new acquaintances. In trying to help these people, however, she learns that she must first help herself.
The film is produced by Trueba’s Madrid-based Los Ilusos Films,...
- 7/2/2019
- by Jamie Lang
- Variety Film + TV
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Recommended Viewinga light and bright start: here's the first trailer for Andrew Bujalski's marvelous workplace comedy Support the Girls. We cannot recommend this movie enough.The ecstatic first trailer for writer-director Josephine Decker's avidly anticipated Sundance hit, Madeline's Madeline. Andrei Tarkovsky's sophomore masterpiece needs no further introduction—here's the trailer for the sublime restoration of Andrei Rublev (1966) by Janus Films. Finally, the long awaited restoration for one of the most seminal films of the 1970s is here: Barbara Loden's Wanda, which by our estimation is a zenith of independent cinema.Yet another restoration we're thrilled by: Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo's sly alternate history It Happened Here (1965). Here's a refreshed version of the original trailer.Furthering the topic of restorations, here's Martin Scorsese in conversations with Italian filmmakers Jonas Carpignano,...
- 6/27/2018
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe acrimonious legal battle between producer Paulo Branco and director Terry Gilliam over the rights to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has reached a perilous stage, and it's beginning to look pretty bad for the dream project of the beleaguered auteur, who a French court has ruled no longer owns the film. American philosopher Stanley Cavell has died at the age of 91. As Charles Petersen wrote for n+1 in a 2013 profile, "Cavell was among the first philosophers to take film seriously"—and few who have encountered his writing on cinema haven't looked at the art in a new way. We heartedly recommend Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage.Recommended VIEWINGAfter a stint in Hollywood resulting in far-flung films ranging from The Time Traveler's Wife and Red to Insurgent, German director Robert Schwentke...
- 6/20/2018
- MUBI
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