Rushes. Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola Reunite, "High Life" Trailer, 1999

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NEWS

• Sofia Coppola is reuniting with her Lost in Translation star Bill Murray for a new film entitled On the Rocks, co-starring Rashida Jones.
• A remarkable online database cohering women film editors significant contributions to cinema has been launched. Women Film Editors is an essential addition to the online film world.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• A24's trailer for the U.S. release of Claire Denis' High Life is here and it does not disappoint. You can find our take on this dark sci-fi here.

• The late Hu Bo's magnificent An Elephant Sitting Still gets a beautiful, elegiac U.S. trailer in the event of an upcoming run at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

• On the other end of cinema's spectrum, here's the trailer for Dan Gilroy's (Nightcrawler, Roman J. Israel, Esq.) Velvet Buzzsaw, starring a manic Jake Gyllenhaal as a exploitative art dealer.

• TIFF, following their retrospective of James Gray, have kindly uploaded an extensive conversation with the great director on his unique career, and singular films.

RECOMMENDED READING

Magnolia

• Looking back 20 years, The Guardian returns to the films of 1999 (The Matrix, Fight Club, Boys Don't Cry, The Sixth Sense, Magnolia). But what might have been "the greatest year of modern cinema" also "left a residue of cynicism we’re still scraping off."
• "While not every recovered film is spectacular, the what-ifs are tantalizing." Fragments, mislabeled titles, and nitrate in basements—Fritzi Kramer on the historical importance of restoring lost silent films (like Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates), and the many difficulties in doing so.
• The January 2019 issue of American Cinematographer shines light on the DPs of your favorite films from the last year and their technical accomplishments. Alfonso Cuarón walks readers through the "monochromatic images" of Roma; Robbie Ryan discusses how he worked with natural light on The Favourite; and First Man's Linus Sandgren defines the film's visual connection to The Battle of Algiers.

 

Jean Renoir in his father's studio, 1911

• An exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris considers the relationship between Jean Renoir and his father, the painter Pierre-August Renoir. The Paris Review provides an overview of the mirroring works of the two artists, which point to a "strained relationship between Renoir père and fils." 

• The legendary Jackie Chan's new memoir, Never Grow Up is a painful rags-to-riches tale about "colonialism, capitalism, and the myths we construct to justify living under both."
• A conversation with the thoughtful and endlessly fascinating Elliott Gould on Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, working with Ingmar Bergman, re-watching Casablanca, and "whatever masculinity is..."

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• Close-Ups on two of spotlighted films: Babis Makridis's Pity, and Neïl Beloufa's Occidental.
• Andrew Northrop introduces the subject of MUBI's retrospective, Belgian documentarian Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, and his metaphysical approach to trauma.
• For the latest entry of his Infinite Fest column, Eric Hatch gathers a roundtable of critics and filmmakers for a conversation on Indie Memphis—"an alternative vision of what a film festival can be—in quality, in diversity, in inclusion, in community, in audience, in regionality, in vision."

EXTRAS AND RE-DISCOVERIES

• The legendary Zhang Yimou shows no sign of slowing down, having just made and released 2018's beautiful, monochromatic Shadow.

First poster for Zhang Yimou's 70's-set rural drama ONE SECOND, co-written with Zou Jingzhi (his screenwriter on Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles & Coming Home), and starring Zhang Yi, Fan Wei & Yu Ailei: pic.twitter.com/DAgdEBFLFu

— Asian Film Strike (@AsianFilmStrike) January 12, 2019