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The Criterion Channel is closing the year out with a bang––they’ve announced their December lineup. Among the highlights are retrospectives on Yasujiro Ozu (featuring nearly 40 films!), Ousmane Sembène, Alfred Hitchcock (along with Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut), and Parker Posey. Well-timed for the season is a holiday noir series that includes They Live By Night, Blast of Silence, Lady in the Lake, and more.

Other highlights are the recent restoration of Abel Gance’s La roue, an MGM Musicals series with introduction by Michael Koresky, Helena Wittmann’s riveting second feature Human Flowers of Flesh, the recent Sundance highlight The Mountains Are a Dream That Call To Me, the new restoration of The Cassandra Cat, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster, and more.

See the lineup below and learn more here.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam, 1988

An American in Paris, Vincente Minnelli,...

Simon Brew Jan 3, 2017

Kevin Costner is planning a new western. In fact, he might just be planning three or four new westerns...

In recent years, Kevin Costner has been ramping his film career back up again, with a mix of projects, the next being the terrific Hidden Figures. Hidden Figures tells the story of the women of Nasa in the 1960s, and in particular their contribution to the space race. Costner takes on a supporting role in that project, which lands in UK cinemas in February.

See related The Losers: revisiting an overlooked comic book movie

Chatting to Variety to promote Hidden Figures, Costner has admitted too that he’s set to return to feature directing, for just the fourth time. Following Dances With Wolves, The Postman and Open Range, Costner admitted that “I have one”, when quizzed about another directorial project.

It’s a new western too. “I’ve been working on it.

Kevin Costner is best utilized as an actor these days, which is why it’s easy to forget that he’s also an Academy Award-winning director. A filmmaker with both Dances with Wolves and The Postman credited to his name, among others, his career behind the camera hasn’t been without high and low points, but he still has a couple of stories that he wants to tell. Notably, a 10 hour Western, which might live to see the light of day in the world of Peak Television, or might live inside the movie theater.

Costner hasn’t kept this project a secret. He’s mentioned it in the past and knows that it’s ambitious and lengthy, especially in a time when Westerns aren’t necessarily profitable. But he hasn’t pushed it aside, nor will he be giving up on it. Promoting his recently released Hidden Figures, the actor...

Ever since Kevin Costner starred in the History Channel's Hatfields & McCoys, he saw a major boost in his career. It's been great to see him in the movies again, but one thing I'd love to see him get back into is directing. The last film he directed was Open Range, and that was 13 years ago. Before that, he directed The Postman and won an Acadamy Award for his directing work on Dances With Wolves in 1991.

It looks like we might actually get to see him direct again as he's been working on an ambitious 10 hour long western! This is a story that could be told over multiple films or a TV series. He told Variety:

"I’ve been working on it. It’s about 10 hours long, how about that? Maybe I’ll make three features out of it. There’s a fourth one, too, so it’s truly a saga.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Amour Fou (Jessica Hausner)

An ecstatically original work of film-history-philosophy with a digital-cinema palette of acutely crafted compositions. Amour Fou seamlessly blends together the paintings of Vermeer, the acting of Bresson, and the psychological undercurrents of a Dostoevsky novel. It is an intensely thrilling and often slyly comic work that manages to combine a passionately dispassionate love story of the highest order with a larger socio-historical examination of a new era of freedom,...

On this day in history as it relates to showbiz...

1040 King Duncan is killed in battle and King Macbeth succeeds him. Shakespeare fictionalizes everything later for Macbeth. So many theatrical productions and movies follow. Out damn spot!

1932 The 1932 Summer Olympics end. This is the Olympic year when gorgeous Buster Crabbe became a gold medalist (pictured left). Hollywood then snatched him right up for movie serials and action adventure franchises including Tarzan The Fearless

1945 Japan surrenders during Ww II (the six year war will last only two more weeks.) but movie makers all over the world have never stopped telling the war's infinite stories. On that same day Steve Martin is born in Waco Texas. It only takes him another 68 years to get the Oscar he totally deserved

1946 Two actor birthdays: Blacksploitation actor Antonio Fargas who became "Huggybear" on TV's popular Starksy & Hutch and Susan Saint James TV of McMillan & Wife...

Co-directors Stephen Lance and Mairi Cameron are just back after spending 10 days in the Us polishing the screenplay of The Secrets Lives of Dresses with the Brooklyn-based writer, Aussie Emma Vuletic.

Lance and Cameron also spent a few days in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to soak up the atmosphere in the town where the source material, Erin McKean.s novel, is set.

Producer Leanne Tonkes and Lance are exploring the idea of co-producing the film with heavyweight Us producer Grant Curtis, who produced all three Spider-Man movies and executive-produced Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful. Curtis and his producing partner Jeremy Wheeler wanted to buy the film rights and contacted Tonkes and Lance after discovering they optioned the novel in 2011.

Tonkes and Lance tell If they will .aim high. in casting the lead roles but will ensure there is significant Australian content to qualify for the 40% producer offset.

The protagonist is Dora,...

for discussion fun

Tootsie, one of the inarguably great American comedies

"The Tuesday Top Ten will get more article-like soon," he said (again). "It really will." But it was so much fun to discuss the 1930s and the 1970s, which are arguably the two most respected decades (critically speaking) of American cinema. So how about a decade that gets no respect? The 1980s. The '80s are tough for me to feel discerning about because I lived through them and was a) young and b) just falling in love with the movies and c) just falling hard for the movies so how could the cinema possibly have been hitting its nadir? I still have inordinate fondness for movies that might more safely be called guilty pleasures like Yentl, Superman II, Splash, Return of the Jedi, Clue, and about half of the filmography of John Hughes... and so on. I even...

Odd List Aliya Whiteley Feb 19, 2013

Covering 85 years of cinema, Aliya provides her pick of 25 stylish, must-see French movies...

I’m going to kick this off in best New-Wave style by pointing out that we should be praising each great director’s body of work rather than showcasing favourite movies in a list format; after all, France came up with the concept of the auteur filmmaker, stamping their personality on a film, using the camera to portray their version of the world.

Yeah, well, personality is everything. So here’s a highly personal choice, arranged in chronological order, of 25 of the most individualistic French films. They may be long or short, old or new, but they all have one thing in common – they’ve got directorial style. And by that I don’t mean their shoes match their handbags.

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)

There are no stirring battle scenes,...

French actress Emmanuelle Béart has been added to the cast of Australian film My Mistress alongside Harrison Gilbertson and Rachael Blake ahead of shooting later this month on the Gold Coast.

The film received Screen Australia funding in November. It’s directed by Stephen Lance and written by Top of the Lake’s Gerard Lee with production by Bran Nue Dae’s Robyn Kershaw and distributed by Transmission Films.

The announcement:

Internationally acclaimed French actress Emmanuelle Béart (A Heart in Winter, Nathalie, Manon of the Spring, Mission: Impossible) will join one of Australia’s rising international stars, AFI Award‐winning Harrison Gilbertson (U.S. independent film Haunt – in the title role opposite Jacki Weaver, Accidents Happen, Blessed, Beneath Hill 60, Conspiracy 365) and AFI Award‐winning actress Rachael Blake (Sleeping Beauty, Lantana, Hawke) in the seductive and touching new film My Mistress.

What starts as a beautiful and strangely innocent...

Review by Barbara Snitzer

Barbara Snitzer writes about French cinema at her movie blog Le Movie Snob

An open letter to M Daniel Auteuil:

D’abord, merci M Auteuil for letting me vicariously spend some of my remaining summer moments in my beloved Provence, especially the most beautiful village I have visited there, Salon-de-Provence. It is my sincere hope your directing début will attract more visitors than those who know it as Nostradamus’ birthplace. (Of course, not too many, especially the English.)

I congratulate you on the favorable reviews you are receiving, and it is with great regret that I cannot join the enthusiastic bandwagon. I do not agree with some criticisms I’ve heard from France that you are not a competent director; au contraire. Choosing a work from the .uvre of Marcel Pagnol whose works are set in the region of your childhood and brought you international acclaim are wise choices,...

French film star Daniel Auteuil came to international prominence a quarter-century ago when he played the dim-witted nephew of evil land baron Yves Montand in "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of the Spring," two films based on epic novels by Marcel Pagnol. For his directorial debut, Auteuil returns to the well, as it were, with another Pagnol adaptation, "The Well Digger's Daughter." American audiences who like their French period pieces extra-French — complete with sun-dappled fields, tree-lined avenues, full-lipped young girls in sundresses and dashing young men in uniform flying World War...

There's a thesis to be written about water in the cinema. Key texts would include Bad Day at Black Rock, Once Upon a Time in the West, Jean de Florette/ Manon des sources, and Chinatown. To these can be added Even the Rain and The Source, European-financed movies about impoverished citizens in respectively Bolivia and north Africa battling with the authorities over the provision of water to their communities. The better of the two is the gripping Even the Rain, scripted by Ken Loach's regular screenwriter Paul Laverty and directed by the Spanish actress Icíar Bollaín, author of a book about working with Loach. Intertwined are a real-life story of a battle to prevent the privatisation of water in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in 2000 and the fictional production in the neighbourhood of a feature film about Christopher Columbus and his legacy. The makers of the movie-within-the-movie are themselves...

French actor Daniel Auteuil makes a solid directorial debut with this story adapted from a Pagnol novel – though it's perhaps on the old-fashioned side

Daniel Auteuil stars and makes a very competent directing debut with this handsome, old-fashioned film, adapted from the novel by Marcel Pagnol. It's a bucolic tale, set around the second world war, which must surely remind his fans of the movies that made his name in the UK: the 1986 dramas Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. Auteuil plays Pascal, a digger and cleaner of wells: he is a greying widower and the father of a number of daughters. The most beautiful of these is the 18-year-old Patricia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) who is being courted by Pascal's heartbreakingly humble, middle-aged mate Félipe (Kad Merad). But she, like Hardy's Tess, is to be romanced and ruined by a handsome, unreliable young man from wealthier stock. This is Jacques (Nicolas Duvauchelle), whose parents,...

Critics will not be able to see love story that features the king and queen of French cinema

The organisers of the Cannes festival have a habit each year of selecting one film with unusually explicit sexual or violent content. Last year Lars von Trier's Antichrist caused outrage with its portrayal of sadistic and masochistic acts, and in 2004 the British director Michael Winterbottom shocked audiences with his erotic romance, 9 Songs. Two years earlier Gaspar Noé pushed back the boundaries at the festival with Irréversible, which featured a prolonged rape scene. This year, in contrast, the festival is accused of deliberately keeping the most provocative French film of the season out of all its selected screenings.

Ça Commence par la Fin, which tells the story of the apparent disintegration of a couple's passionate physical and emotional relationship and which stars the husband and wife team Michaël Cohen and Emmanuelle Béart...

Oh merde… French cinema just lost one of his mentors. Legendary filmmaker Claude Berri died from from a serious neurological condition last week-end. As a director, he was responsible for many French blockbusters, including Germinal, the famous Emile Zola adaptation starring Gerard Depardieu, Jean de Florette and its sequel Manon Des Sources, the movie that made Emmanuelle Beart an international star. When wearing the producer’s hat, Berri was responsible for an impressive number of films such as the first two Asterix, Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot, Claude Miller’s La petit voleuse and many more. This is a major loss as Claude Berri was always a supporter of both popular and author cinema. He will be missed.