Reconsidering Tomu Uchida, American Genre Film Archive, Fosse’s Swan Song
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- For Film Comment, Marc Walkow surveys the career of director Tomu Uchida, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Like many commercial Japanese directors of his era, Uchida has long been underappreciated in the West, but “the uniformly high quality of his works and his ability to succeed in a variety of genres mark him as a filmmaker very ripe for (re)consideration by critics.”
- Over at Sight & Sound, Ginette Vincendeau traces the origins of French film noir and lists twelve of the genre’s essential works, including Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine, and Jules Dassin’s Rififi.
- In Brooklyn magazine, Max Kyburz explores the history of the American Genre Film Archive, Alamo Drafthouse’s nonprofit collection of 3,500 neglected titles.
- For Cineaste, Graham Fuller examines the elements of psychodrama in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place.
- Little White Lies celebrates Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev for “the diversity and extremity of its divergences.”
- In a new interview with the Village Voice’s Bilge Ebiri, composer Hanan Townshend discusses his collaborations with Terrence Malick: “Terry sometimes says he’s the carpenter and I’m providing him with the wood and the nails.”
- As part of Behind the Screens, a series of interviews with film programmers, the Observer speaks with the Japan Society’s Aiko Masubuchi on her mini-retrospective Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Film & 1980s Japan.
- “It’s like Chekhov—a black comedy, a human comedy,” says Isabelle Huppert about her controversial new film Elle.
- Over at RogerEbert.com, Christina Newland calls Bob Fosse’s final film, Star 80, “a terrifying and genre-less descent into the red mist of misogyny.”
- Fusion’s Isha Aran uncovers the story of Li-Ling Ai, the unsung Chinese-American woman who conceptualized the 1941 Oscar-winning documentary Kukan.
- The Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring pays tribute to musical icon Leon Russell, who passed away last Sunday.
