In partnership with the Cinémathèque Française and the French National Film Board, Netflix will be financing a new restoration of Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic Napoléon ahead of the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death this summer. The film has been restored many times before, but this restoration aims to bring to life Gance’s 7-hour “Apollo cut,” named after the Apollo Theatre where the film screened in 1927.
Beanpole filmmaker Kantemir Balagov has found his next project: An HBO series adaptation of the hit zombie video game series, The Last of Us.
Bong Joon-ho will head the main jury of this year’s Venice Film Festival, marking the first time a South Korean director has been picked as the top juror at the festival.
Tilda Swinton, who most recently starred in Pedro Almodóvar’s short The Human Voice, will reunite with Joanna Hogg for a new film entitled The Eternal Daughter. She’s also attached to a project helmed by Christopher Doyle, Immunodeficiency, about the kidnapping of a “bee professor.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
The official trailer for The World to Come, Mona Fastvold’s 19th century-set period drama about two women (Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby) who fall in love in the American Northeast. The film won the Queer Lion award at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival.
KimStim’s trailer for Frank Beauvais’s Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, which will be available in virtual cinemas on January 29. The film, which previously played on MUBI in the Undiscovered series, pieces together excerpts from 450 fiction films to tell a tale of love, memories, and loss.
Venice Special Jury Prize winner and Russia’s entry for this year’s Academy Awards, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! follows the tragic aftermath of a workers’ strike at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant in 1962.
RECOMMENDED READING
In a new essay for Criterion, Nicolas Rapold writes about the microcinemas (including Spectacle Theater in New York, Chicago Film Society, and Acropolis Cinema in Los Angeles) that are navigating and transcending the limitations of the pandemic.
Tsai Ming-liang’s Days tops Reverse Shot’s best of 2020 list, which also includes Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth.
“Joan Micklin Silver’s work will outlive her now-dying nation.” For n+1, Carlos Valladares remembers the lived-in cinema of Joan Micklin Silver.
Calum Marsh of the New York Times offers a deeper look into Letterboxd, the social media network that is slowly entering the mainstream, and its burgeoning population of fans and critics.
In his review of One Night in Miami, K. Austin Collins praises Regina King’s skillful directorial debut for its polished and undistracted imagination.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Pamela Cohn’s new podcast, LUCID DREAMING, is a collection of probing “deep stereo conversations” with contemporary artists around the world, including Shireen Seno, Miko Revereza, and Ana Vaz.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
For the streaming premiere of Ekwa Msangi’s Farewell Amor (which is exclusively showing in the UK and other countries in the Debuts series), Msangi and artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah discuss her film debut, Angolan dance, and the African experience in New York in a wide-ranging conversation.
Amos Levin continues his video essay series, “Like Watching Paint Dry,” which explores how paintings directly influence color schemes in the films of Éric Rohmer, with a study of Rohmer’s Full Moon in Paris.
In her Close-Up on Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, Carolyn Funk explores the ways in which Loach gives the female working class a voice through the “ecstatic saturation” of color. The film is showing on MUBI starting January 9, 2021 in the United Kingdom in the series First Films First.
In an interview with Marc Nemcik, Lance Oppenheim and Daniel Garber discuss the development of their film Some Kind of Heaven, which follows a small group of residents in Central Florida’s notorious retirement community The Villages.
Jeremy Carr selects One Shot from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America that epitomizes Leone’s study of perception and memory. The film is showing on MUBI starting January 17, 2021 in the UK and other countries.
