True-Crime Classics, the Century’s Best Sci-Fi, Linklater’s Characters
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- Writer Harold Schechter shares a list of five true-crime films that encapsulate the essence of fear—including collection favorites In Cold Blood, The Honeymoon Killers, and Badlands—in the Library of America’s biweekly Moviegoer column. Of Badlands’s unique juxtaposition of beauty and horror, Schechter writes that the “incongruity mirrors both the dissociated mindset of its protagonists—a pair of alienated losers who see themselves as stars of a glamorous love story—and the schizoid soul of Vietnam-era America.”
- The Cannes Film Festival announced that it would host a tribute to Prince at next month’s event to honor the late icon’s film legacy.
- And the just-announced lineup for the Cannes Classics program will include films by Bertrand Tavernier, Frederick Wiseman, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Milos Forman, Godard, James Ivory, and others.
- Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men tops Fandor’s list of the best sci-fi films (so far) of the twenty-first century. Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 reimagining of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, and Shane Carruth’s Primer and Upstream Color also made the list.
- In the latest issue of feminist film journal cléo, writer Kathleen Kampeas-Rittenhouse explores the female protagonists in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and the Dardenne brothers’s Two Days, One Night. “Although the films’ heroines are separated by nationality and roughly fifteen years in age,” she writes, “their physical similarities and mutually grim expressions convey the collective emotional toll of economic survival.”
- Film critic Melissa Anderson writes about the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “vast and revelatory” Queer Cinema Before Stonewall series, beginning tonight, which “reminds us that complex bent characters and story lines could be found at the movies even during less tolerant times.”
- And elsewhere, she interviews scholar Terry Castle about early cinema depictions of lesbianism.
- On the heels of the theatrical release of Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater’s spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused,Wired offers a ranking by coolness of all forty-nine Dazed characters.
- Plus, a new interview with Linklater on Hazlitt
- “Fassbinder expected his viewers to stretch their sympathies unusually far, extend their pity particularly generously, and try out attitudes that repelled and disturbed them,” Max Nelson writes about German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the movies he loved in an essay on the Metrograph’s website, in an accompaniment to the theater’s series Fassbinder’s Top 10. “It was only honest of him,” Nelson adds, “to seek out films that required the same of him.”
