It’s a given that their Main Slate — the fresh, the recently buzzed-about, the mysterious, the anticipated — will be the New York Film Festival’s primary point of attraction for both media coverage and ticket sales. But while a rather fine lineup is, to these eyes, deserving of such treatment, the festival’s latest Revivals section — i.e. “important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners,” per their press release — is in a whole other class, one titanic name after another granted a representation that these particular works have so long lacked.
The list speaks for itself, even (or especially) if you’re more likely to recognize a director than title. Included therein are films by Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Daughter of the Nile, a personal favorite), Pedro Costa (Casa de Lava; trailer here), Jean-Luc Godard (the rarely seen,...
The list speaks for itself, even (or especially) if you’re more likely to recognize a director than title. Included therein are films by Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Daughter of the Nile, a personal favorite), Pedro Costa (Casa de Lava; trailer here), Jean-Luc Godard (the rarely seen,...
- 8/21/2017
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSOver the weekend we lost two greats: Filmmaker George A. Romero, best known for inventing the modern version of all things zombie, and actor Martin Landau. Patton Oswalt has pointed out that a 19-year-old Romero worked as a pageboy on North by Northwest, Landau's second movie.The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has again added more names to its membership, and this latest batch includes even more unexpected additions from the world of international art cinema, including directors Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, Ann Hui, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kira Muratova, Johnnie To and Athina Rachel Tsangari.Did you see that the lineup of the Locarno Film Festival has been announced? With a huge retrospective devoted to Cat People director Jacques Tourneur and a competition including new films by Wang Bing, F.J. Ossang, Ben Russell,...
- 7/19/2017
- MUBI
Before diving deep into the slums of Fontainhas for his epochal trilogy and its follow-up, Horse Money, Pedro Costa applied his lens in a significantly different way — though no less impressively and, I do not think it’s at all unfair to say, far more accessibly. To my mind, the best display of his early talents is 1994’s Casa de Lava, a mystery of mistaken (or forged) identity — and a reworking of Jacques Tourneur’s classic I Walked with a Zombie — grounded in Portugal’s stunning Cape Verde islands. It’s understandable that something from a filmmaker with Costa’s marginalized status would go so long without a U.S. release, yet still disappointing in sight of the entrancing thing itself.
That will change this fall as Grasshopper Film release Casa de Lava on Blu-ray and DVD, in advance of which there is a brief, appropriately enigmatic teaser that gives...
That will change this fall as Grasshopper Film release Casa de Lava on Blu-ray and DVD, in advance of which there is a brief, appropriately enigmatic teaser that gives...
- 7/6/2017
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
There are many reasons Cinema Guild is probably our favorite distributor, chief among them the sense that their slate consists almost entirely of titles that even the second- and third-most adventurous distributors would express hesitance about putting into the world. Make of it what you will, then, that their former distribution executive, Ryan Krivoshey, has just launched Grasshopper Film, an outlet that immediately sounds no less crucial than his old haunting ground.
Their initial press release is a murderer’s row of international voices, a few favorites of ours included. Just look at its first release: in some sense following the lead of Cinema Guild’s major unveiling of About Elly last year, they’re leading off with Asghar Farhadi‘s 2006 picture Fireworks Wednesday — previously released by Facets and less-than-easy to acquire for years — which comes to New York on March 16.
It’s expected that each year will offer eight-to-twelve...
Their initial press release is a murderer’s row of international voices, a few favorites of ours included. Just look at its first release: in some sense following the lead of Cinema Guild’s major unveiling of About Elly last year, they’re leading off with Asghar Farhadi‘s 2006 picture Fireworks Wednesday — previously released by Facets and less-than-easy to acquire for years — which comes to New York on March 16.
It’s expected that each year will offer eight-to-twelve...
- 2/15/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Thom Andersen and Pedro Costa on stage at the Courtisane Festival. Photo by Michiel Devijver.This year’s Courtisane Festival paired Pedro Costa and Thom Andersen as their artists in focus. Both filmmakers hung out with each other and the public for the full five days of this under-recognized gem of a festival in Ghent. What at first might seem very different directors with distinct backgrounds actually proved to be kindred spirits. In the end credits of his new cine-history, The Thoughts That Once We Had, Andersen thanks Costa, because “without [him] this motion picture would have been poorer.” Andersen has admired Costa’s work ever since he discovered In Vanda’s Room (2000) at the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in 2001. He wrote about this experience and about Colossal Youth (2006) in Film Comment in 2007. Andersen has invited Costa to CalArts, where he teaches, more than once, and Cinema Scope published a...
- 7/17/2015
- by Ruben Demasure
- MUBI
News.
As reported yesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival has begun unveiling its 2013 lineup, beginning with Gala and Special Presentations. An exciting heads-up and major opportunity for young filmmakers: Tribeca Film Festival is collaborating with the Imagination Series: Film Competition for a filmmaking contest in which screenwriters and directors pitch their conceptual take on a short script by Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious). Five ideas will be produced, and the resulting films will be shown at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. With a chance to write and direct an instant-entry at Tribeca, the contest catch phrase makes it sound almost too easy: "No experience required. Just imagination." Lumière is soon to be releasing their 6th issue in print (check the Table of Contents here). Online you can find a piece on Gregory J. Markopoulos by our own David Phelps, as well as a conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky conducted by Francisco Algarín Navarro and...
As reported yesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival has begun unveiling its 2013 lineup, beginning with Gala and Special Presentations. An exciting heads-up and major opportunity for young filmmakers: Tribeca Film Festival is collaborating with the Imagination Series: Film Competition for a filmmaking contest in which screenwriters and directors pitch their conceptual take on a short script by Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious). Five ideas will be produced, and the resulting films will be shown at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. With a chance to write and direct an instant-entry at Tribeca, the contest catch phrase makes it sound almost too easy: "No experience required. Just imagination." Lumière is soon to be releasing their 6th issue in print (check the Table of Contents here). Online you can find a piece on Gregory J. Markopoulos by our own David Phelps, as well as a conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky conducted by Francisco Algarín Navarro and...
- 8/5/2013
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
Portuguese maestro Pedro Costa came to the UK at the beginning of October, 2012. He initially arrived in Cambridge University for a screening of the sublime In Vanda's Room, then he traveled down to the capital to take part in a pair of Q&As following presentations of the newly remastered Second Run DVD release of Casa De Lava and a 35mm print of Ne change rien. As Ne change rien played, I sat and waited with Costa in the bar of London's Ica cinema and, with a tape rolling on the table, we started to talk.
David Jenkins: How does the projection look?
Pedro Costa: It's great. It must be the projectionist. The sound and the image are perfectly balanced. The other day I got hold of the first Dcp of Historic Centre and the girl who screened our test was the popcorn girl. Which is okay, but.
David Jenkins: How does the projection look?
Pedro Costa: It's great. It must be the projectionist. The sound and the image are perfectly balanced. The other day I got hold of the first Dcp of Historic Centre and the girl who screened our test was the popcorn girl. Which is okay, but.
- 3/11/2013
- by David Jenkins
- MUBI
★★★★☆ Loosely based on Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Pedro Costa's 1994 effort Casa de Lava (oddly titled Down To Earth for its Us release) is undoubtedly a demanding film - but then Costa's cinema has always been a challenge. What the Portuguese director demands of his audience he richly pays back, with features that stay with you long after watching them.
Read more »...
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- 9/25/2012
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
When the camera moves in Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon (a film that manages to be baroque, Gothic, Expressionist and modernist at all once), it moves so weightlessly, relentlessly and unexpectedly that it seems as though it might at any moment pass—Fincher-style—through a wall. And sometimes it actually does. It performs the trick it's been hinting at. It slides sly, unshowy, snake-like from one room into another without missing a beat of the action.
For example: A priest and a boy are sitting in the waiting room of a country estate. The boy stands up to look at some paintings that are hanging on the wall, and Ruiz cuts from the boy's perspective of the paintings to some reverse shots of him to some vague and distorted images (suggesting "memories" in '40s shorthand) and then back to the wide shot of the waiting room—the trusty,...
For example: A priest and a boy are sitting in the waiting room of a country estate. The boy stands up to look at some paintings that are hanging on the wall, and Ruiz cuts from the boy's perspective of the paintings to some reverse shots of him to some vague and distorted images (suggesting "memories" in '40s shorthand) and then back to the wide shot of the waiting room—the trusty,...
- 8/5/2011
- MUBI
Jornal de Notícias is among the Portuguese news outlets reporting today that Pedro Hestnes, the actor best known internationally for his performances in Pedro Costa's Blood and Casa de Lava and Manuel Mozos's Xavier, has succumbed to cancer at the age of 49. His funeral will be held this afternoon at the Camarate cemetery in Loures. Hestnes had just completed work on Catarina Ruivo's Em segunda mão, currently in post-production, and was first diagnosed just two months ago.
- 6/21/2011
- MUBI
When asked, if I recall correctly, by an interlocutor from the late, great, Musician magazine, what he hoped to achieve via his bass playing, the magnificent (and still active) musician Charlie Haden responded, "I want to make every note beautiful." And every note Haden plays, sweet or sour, is always beautiful, well-rounded, kind of a staggering individual work in and of itself.
Watching Portuguese director Pedro Costa's first feature, 1989's O Sangue, one imagines that a kind of similar mission moved the filmmaker, who had put himself through a lengthy apprenticeship assisting other filmmakers who did not quite share such an idea.
Every single shot in O Sangue is beautiful, incredibly sharp and well-defined, suffused with ache and sensuality. The multi-leveled cinematic references—to Murnau's Sunrise, to the films of Val Lewton, which Costa will reference even more explicitly in his next feature Casa de Lava, to Antonioni and...
Watching Portuguese director Pedro Costa's first feature, 1989's O Sangue, one imagines that a kind of similar mission moved the filmmaker, who had put himself through a lengthy apprenticeship assisting other filmmakers who did not quite share such an idea.
Every single shot in O Sangue is beautiful, incredibly sharp and well-defined, suffused with ache and sensuality. The multi-leveled cinematic references—to Murnau's Sunrise, to the films of Val Lewton, which Costa will reference even more explicitly in his next feature Casa de Lava, to Antonioni and...
- 10/27/2009
- MUBI
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