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When production designers Shona Heath and James Price were tasked with designing the dark comedy Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-nominated movie about a woman whose resurrected with her infant’s brain, they had several key decisions to make. For starters, how would they represent the London mansion, which included the laboratory of mad scientist Dr. Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe? The answer turned out to be simple: They’d put human anatomy along the walls and ceiling.

They stapled packing foam to the atrium ceiling to resemble the “wiggly bits...

In most fantasy movies, the job of the production team is to create a breathtaking new world that dazzles the viewer, but this Oscar season shows a new trend: stories in which the characters themselves are taken on a journey of discovery and adventure.

In Poor Things, a young woman named Bella is brought back to life by a mad surgeon and goes sightseeing in Europe. In The Marvels, the MCU’s new worlds are seen through the awed eyes of Captain Marvel’s protégée, Kamala Khan. And in Barbie, the Mattel superstar leaves her perfect life to sample the unknown pleasures of the real world…

‘Poor Things’ Lisbon set

Poor Things

For Yorgos Lanthimos’ screen adaptation of Poor Things, the director was interested in the premise of making a 1930s-style movie with the technology of today. This meant that production designers Shona Heath and James Price were given the...

Below you will find our favorite films of the 45th International Film Festival Rotterdam, as well as an index of our coverage.Daniel Kasmantop Picksi. Lejos de los árboles, Le Moulin, Female Student Guerilla, Noche de vino tintoII. Juke: Passages from Films of Spencer Williams, Warsaw Bridge, MotherIII. Night and Fog in the ZonaIV. Where the Chocolate Mountains, ElliV. Operation Avalanche, Sixty Six, Fata Morgana, Cada vez que..., Oleg y las raras artes, ActeonCOVERAGEFirst Steps: Ear, Nose and Throat (Kevin Jerome Everson), Lejos de los árboles (Jacinto Esteva Grewe)Acting Out: General Report II: The New Abduction of Europe (Pere Portabella), Esquizo (Ricardo Bofill), Actor Martinez (Mike Ott, Nathan Silver)Japan's Cinematic Revolutionary: Sex Game (Masao Adachi), Female Student Guerilla (Masao Adachi), Artist of Fasting (Masao Adachi)The Streets, the Mountains, the Snow, and the Ocean: Noche de vino tinto (José María Nunes), Where the Chocolate Mountains (Pat O'Neill), Cinéma...

The major retrospective of the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam is dedicated to the Barcelona school of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, with Catalonian master Pere Portabella’s body of work—and his new film—serving as a figurehead. Nearly completely unknown in the United States—where critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has been a beacon of support and revelation—insomuch as Portabella is known in the film community it is for his film Vampir-Cuadecuc, which hijacks the production of Christopher Lee and Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970) for its own ends and exhilaratingly exposes this documentarian’s acute analysis of and play with the subject of his films. (I will note here that Mubi has shown a great deal of Portabella’s work in the past, including this 1970 horror film.) This is hardly a lone accomplishment; in 1961 he helped produce Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Viridiana, and the director has been a strident voice in documentary,...