Look Who’s Back
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Currently preparing to unveil its 2026 lineup on April 9, Cannes has announced that an honorary Palme d’Or will be presented to Peter Jackson on May 12. In other festival news, Tricia Tuttle will remain the director of the Berlinale. The festival would like to make clear that Berlin’s supervisory board has issued a set of recommendations as to how to deal with political controversies in the future, but they are just that—recommendations, and not, as reported in some conservative media outlets, a code of conduct.
Slava Tsukerman, best known for his 1982 cult hit Liquid Sky, passed away on Monday at the age of eighty-five. When Liquid Sky was restored and revived in 2018, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl called it a “neon-fired New Wave New York alien sex-party punk-disco orgasm-as-revenge proto-electroclash feminist genderfuck.”
Producer Kenith Trodd, who worked closely with Dennis Potter on Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986) as well as with Mike Leigh on Four Days in July (1984) and Paul Greengrass on The Fix (1997), has died. He was ninety. Trodd also had a hand in Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger’s British Sounds (1969), though as Ian Greaves points out, Trodd “played down his centrality to the film, telling me after a screening at the BFI that his main involvement had amounted to meeting JLG at airports to hand over briefcases filled with cash.”
This week’s highlights:
- From its third issue, Outskirts has posted David Phelps’s comprehensive essay on Hiroshi Shimizu, and Phelps joins the editors on the Outskirts Film Podcast to further discuss the work of the director that host Christopher Small calls “the most perennially underrated of Japanese classical masters.” “Neither time nor space nor bodies can be orchestrated or controlled in these films,” writes Phelps, “but can only be surrendered to in slabs of space-time, glimpses of lives lived well beyond the physical and temporal confines of the shot. It’s a wholly familiar post-classical view, familiar from the school of Kiarostami, Hou, Yang, and Somai (a major Shimizu fan), all of whom also innovated late-century neorealism through films about children.”
- “I’m not trying to do an Ezra Pound canto,” John Akomfrah tells Sabo Kpade in the new Brooklyn Rail. The current iteration of Akomfrah’s Listening All Night to the Rain—a project that premiered at the sixtieth Venice Biennial and is now on view at Lisson Gallery in New York through April 25—introduces a multi-channel film, Canto VI (2024). “Here,” writes Kpade, “the canto becomes an audiovisual vessel organizing colonial archives, diasporic memory, Black Atlantic and climate histories.” Setting aside the poet’s politics, there’s “a kind of erudition to Pound,” says Akomfrah, “a well-learnedness, and when you’re in your sixties, you think, ‘Well, maybe I should aspire to that’—not that you necessarily make it.”
- “Who, today, remembers Robert Vas?” asks Sukhdev Sandhu in Prospect. “His Refuge England (1959), a partly autobiographical account of a Hungarian migrant trying to make sense of London—its confusing streets and dizzying profusion of signs—is a marvel of Free Cinema. But he’s far less heralded than other figures in that briefly flaring movement; the likes of Lindsay Anderson or Karel Reisz or Tony Richardson. In just two decades, he made over thirty expansive and deeply humanistic films, on topics ranging from Laurel and Hardy to Solzhenitsyn, the Katyn forest massacre to the trial and death of Jesus.” On March 27, Birkbeck College will host a symposium, Robert Vas in Context.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, the head film critic at the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008, has returned to the weekly with a new monthly column, Moving Places. “I might be doing an injustice to fans of One Battle After Another (2025) by claiming that it gratifies woke folks by flattering us as radicals rather than provoking us into activism,” writes Rosenbaum. “But that ad-speak jingle ‘woke folks,’ equally soft on the ears and mind, glibly caricatures our integrity as freethinking individuals. It also zooms past other issues, like the movie’s blurred, confusing sense of contemporary history, unlike the precise period placements in Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which inspired Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie. Thus, if I ‘target’ the film’s advocates, I could be dismissing legitimate as well as dubious reasons for enjoying it in order to score points about its commercial cross-purposes.”
- The new Cineaste is out, accompanied as always by a few online exclusives. David Sterritt reviews Joseph Losey’s “somber, single-minded, and relentless” antiwar movie, King and Country (1964). Mitchell Abidor talks with Shai Carmeli-Pollak about The Sea (2025), which won five Israeli Academy Awards, including Best Feature Film. Shahnaz Mahmud interviews Bi Gan, and Jiwei Xiao reviews Bi’s latest feature: “More than a eulogy that memorializes a century of film history, Resurrection holds out a torch of leaping, incandescent flames to illuminate a new path for cinema’s becoming, for its potential yet to be discovered.”
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