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Nelson’s excerpted memoir appears in Life as We Show It, an anthology of essays, screenplays, and stories about watching movies that has the virtue of not treating life and cinema as obvious antagonists. In the introductory essay, co-editor Masha Tupitsyn recalls a classic scene from the 1958 film The Blob in which the eponymous monster, oozing out of a projection booth, devours the bodies of moviegoers and expands until it spills out of the movie house and onto the street....

Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young appear in Shirley (Josephine Decker, 2020) an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Thatcher Keats We kick things off this week by retracing some recent awards news, beginning with this morning’s announcement of the 2020 Golden Globes nominations. The British Independent Film Awards were handed on out Sunday night, with For Sama taking home three major prizes—Best British Independent Film, Best Documentary, and Best Director....

Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, 1870) “Our African films are underused and underdeveloped. We have good ideas but do not have a way of financing and distributing films. There’s no African movie industry that would allow us to produce our own image.” Legendary Mauritanian director Med Hondo passed away this week. Read his 1982 interview with Jump Cut here. The Japan Society has announced their upcoming program, The Other Japanese New Wave: Radical Films from 1958-61, which aims to shed a light on lesser-known post-war filmmakers....

About Endlessness About Endlessness About Endlessness Adolf Hitler in his bunker. A midwife who loves champagne. A divorce prosecutor who doesn’t trust banks. A man who hasn’t yet met love. These are some of the characters slated to appear in About Endlessness, the next installment in Roy Andersson’s singular collection of blackly comic films about the human condition. Consisting of a series of loosely connected—and meticulously designed—vignettes, About Endlessness is similar in tone and style to the director’s Living Trilogy (which concluded in 2015 with A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence), except for a few key differences....

I sort of backed into it. That is to say, I did some plays in college, and then I became part of a theater group that Paul Sills started in Chicago called Playwrights Theater. At that point I had a job as a disc jockey in a classical music station, which is how I supported myself. I would occasionally go to New York and see plays directed, for instance, by Kazan, and I became more and more curious about how he worked....

The idea of a film devoted solely to the final stage of Jesus of Nazareth’s life is not as original as it sounds. Italian filmmaker Paolo Benvenuti beat Mel Gibson to it in his 1988 debut The Kiss of Judas (Il bacio di Giuda). More or less the antithesis of The Passion of the Christ, it’s one of cinema’s most original treatments of the Bible. Well, not just the Bible....

Carl (Harris Dickinson), a model on a luxury cruise with his influencer girlfriend Yaya (the late Charlbi Dean), lays a chunky hardcover across his suntanned abs. As the couple bicker about whether or not she chirped “hi!” in a flirty way at a buff, shirtless deckhand, the title of the book is prominent in the foreground: Ulysses. At first, this choice of beach read seems like a sight gag. It’s hard to fathom that anybody would spend their vacation with Leopold Bloom, especially someone who’s built their life around the careful construction of alluring surfaces....

Images from Love Is Colder Than Death (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969) There have been so few true rebels in film history—one of the many reasons we can’t stop talking about Rainer Werner Fassbinder. From the very beginning of his career, it’s clear he was not eager to ingratiate himself with the film world. His debut feature, Love Is Colder Than Death, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1969, and was immediately met with divisive reactions from a vocal audience....

My late father was never a cinephile, not even remotely, but he managed and programmed a small chain of movie theaters in northwestern Alabama for about a quarter of a century, from the mid-’30s to 1960. And during most or all of that period, he read Time magazine every week, from cover to cover. This means that from September 1942, half a year before I was born, until early November 1948, and not counting all the press books that passed through his office and the various trade journals he subscribed to, just about everything he read and knew about movies came from the so-called Cinema pages of Time, and most of these were written by James Agee....

Jean-Luc Godard once famously quipped something to the effect that “the history of the movies is the story of boys looking at girls.” That could be the motto for a small but rich sub-genre of films: near-plotless accounts of young male romantics ambling through picturesque cities, fixating on one beautiful stranger after the next, yet opening up to none of them, consoling themselves with their own private epiphanies while remaining essentially alone....

Jacques Rozier is often conspicuously absent from tributes to the French New Wave. Even though his debut Adieu Philippine (released in 1962) was considered a landmark film of the emerging movement, championed by Godard and Truffaut and featured on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma’s special edition on La Nouvelle Vague, its commercial failure set the course for Rozier’s subsequent career in cinema. It would be 10 years until his next features, Du côté d’Orouët (73) and The Castaways of Turtle Island (76)....

Broken Lullaby The coming of sound made Nancy Carroll a short-lived star. One of the first women to sing and dance on a studio sound stage (Abie’s Irish Rose, 28), Carroll was recruited from the New York City theater, where she had been performing since her teenage years. A vibrant presence in early talkies, she saw her career decline through the 1930s, where, rightly or not, she earned a reputation of being “difficult....

At its worst, which is fairly awful, Catherine Breillat’s sex-shock cinema highlights the pat in epater le bourgeoisie. Her latest, Anatomy of Hell, doesn’t so much straddle the fine line between art and porn as balance, bleeding, on the knife’s edge between trenchant and pretentious. Let’s start with the film’s patronizing disclaimer: “A film is an illusion, not reality—fiction or a happening: it is a true work of fiction.” Didn’t James Cameron already make True Lies?...

Step aside, Clapton, it’s time to give the drummer some. Jay Bulger’s debut, Beware of Mr. Baker, is a captivating documentary on Ginger Baker, known primarily as the drummer and founding member of the late Sixties supergroup Cream. A power trio comprised of Baker, bassist Jack Bruce and guitar “god” Eric Clapton, Cream burned through the U.K and the U.S. with their unique version of blues-based, psychedelic-tinged heavy rock before disbanding after only two years in 1968....

Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021) 1992’s Candyman had a wide focus, making use of horror tropes to traverse America’s slave-owning history and the gentrification and racist violence that took its place in the Cabrini-Green housing projects of 1990s Chicago. Tony Todd, the kind of actor who only needs to be in the same room as a camera to effectively project his presence, imbued the title role with melancholy, menace, and a sense of melodrama that befit his stated vision of the character as his very own Phantom of the Opera....