IT'S ALIVE! The Cannes Festival, much like the sphinx rising from the ashes, announced today that it will open its July edition with a Leos Carax movie, "Annette," starring Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. Anyone who reads Screen Comment and my fourteen year-long exclusive coverage of the world's best film festival for this magazine will know that Cannes normally takes place in May but, what with ... more >
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BRIEFLY : “A Concerto is a Conversation”
The Academy Award-nominated short subject documentary film "A concerto is a conversation," which was executive-produced by Ava DuVernay and recently premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, is now streaming from The New York Times Op-Docs. Kris Bowers (pictured) is one of Hollywood’s rising young composers. At twenty-nine he scored the Oscar-winning film “Green Book” (2018), and this year ... more >
CANNES FESTIVAL announces summer-bound edition in 2021. But will it stick?
Festival normally takes place yearly in May
The Cannes Festival will indeed take place this year, two months later than usual. In a press release sent this afternoon by email, the festival said the 2021 edition would run from the 6th to the 17th of July. Cannes would thus take place about a month after the government of France will have been able to complete dissemination of the covid-19 vaccine nationwide, the idea being that, for France, ... more >
His name was Michael Apted
Michael Apted, who died last Thursday at the age of 79, was an artisan filmmaker who started out in England and ended up in Hollywood. As documentary filmmaker, he's made films about Sting and the Tiananmen square protest. He later would go on to shoot fantasy sagas. He gravitated towards socially-aware subjects and strong female characters, especially during his television directing days, a ... more >
PHOTOGRAPH: Alessandro Michele and Gus Van Sant
In this photo Gucci's artistic director Alessandro Michele stands with "My Own Private Idaho" director Gus Van Sant. Together they created "Ouverture of something that never ended," an online film festival that was shot in twenty days and that's made up of seven episodes of about twenty minutes, each. "Ouverture" launched November 16th and ends today on Gucci's YouTube channel and the GucciFest ... more >
FIRST LOOK: “Driving while black: race, space and mobility in America”
A new documentary offering from PBS
“Driving while black: race, space and mobility in America” is a two-hour documentary film by historian Dr. Gretchen Sorin and Emmy–winning director Ric Burns that will air on PBS this Tuesday. Recounting the history and personal experiences—at once liberating and challenging—of black people on the road from the advent of the automobile through the seismic changes of the sixties and beyond ... more >
MICHAEL LONSDALE’S DEATH | France’s gentleman thespian passes on
He had 145 acting credits to his name
Screen Comment being not just a cinephile media but also a French-American publication, we would be twice remiss not to mention persons and events from across the pond, at least some of the time. The death of Michael Lonsdale, a formidable actor, himself bi-national (his French mother conceived him with the help of a British officer in 1930—Lonsdale was born in May of the following year), was ... more >