In the absence of summer blockbusters or big sporting events, docs such as Diego Maradona are proving super substitutes
Which would we rather live without: movies or sport? Right now, we have no choice, but usually at this time of year, the two would be vying for our attention: big summer blockbusters versus big sporting events such as Euro 2020 and the Olympics. Now all we have got are empty stadiums and cinemas, and endless discussions about when either might reopen.
By way of compensation, we can at least watch films about sport, and canny operators are filling the void this summer. New streaming releases include the documentaries In Search of Greatness, on sport’s great innovators, and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Infinite Football (on a Romanian eccentric who attempted to reinvent the beautiful game – by making it utterly confusing), while Netflix is doing gangbusters with its Michael Jordan doc The Last Dance.
Which would we rather live without: movies or sport? Right now, we have no choice, but usually at this time of year, the two would be vying for our attention: big summer blockbusters versus big sporting events such as Euro 2020 and the Olympics. Now all we have got are empty stadiums and cinemas, and endless discussions about when either might reopen.
By way of compensation, we can at least watch films about sport, and canny operators are filling the void this summer. New streaming releases include the documentaries In Search of Greatness, on sport’s great innovators, and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Infinite Football (on a Romanian eccentric who attempted to reinvent the beautiful game – by making it utterly confusing), while Netflix is doing gangbusters with its Michael Jordan doc The Last Dance.
- 5/18/2020
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.
Before we get to our weekly streaming picks, check out our annual feature: Where to Stream the Best Films of 2019.
Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Mads Brügger)
In 1961, Secretary-General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in Africa under mysterious circumstances. Beginning as an investigation into his still-unsolved death, the trail that Mads Brügger follows in Cold Case Hammarskjöld is one that expands to implicate some of the world’s most powerful governments in unfathomably heinous crimes. Without revealing the specifics of the jaw-dropping revelations in this thoroughly engrossing documentary, if there’s any justice, what is brought to light will cause global...
Before we get to our weekly streaming picks, check out our annual feature: Where to Stream the Best Films of 2019.
Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Mads Brügger)
In 1961, Secretary-General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in Africa under mysterious circumstances. Beginning as an investigation into his still-unsolved death, the trail that Mads Brügger follows in Cold Case Hammarskjöld is one that expands to implicate some of the world’s most powerful governments in unfathomably heinous crimes. Without revealing the specifics of the jaw-dropping revelations in this thoroughly engrossing documentary, if there’s any justice, what is brought to light will cause global...
- 12/20/2019
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
The Passenger
Another New Romanian Wave essential, Corneliu Porumboiu borrows a moniker from Antonioni for his fifth feature, The Passenger (previously known as Gomera). A co-production between Romania (42 Km Film), France (Les Films du Worso) and Germany (Komplizen Film), Porumboiu’s latest finds Marcela Ursu as a producer and a host of notable co-producers, including Maren Ade, Sylvie Pialat, Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach. Dp Tudor Mircea reunites with Porumboiu for the fourth time. Described as a dramatic thriller, Porumboiu assembles a notable cast, led by popular Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov, Rodica Lazar, Catrinel Marlon, and famed Catalan director Agusti Villaronga.…...
Another New Romanian Wave essential, Corneliu Porumboiu borrows a moniker from Antonioni for his fifth feature, The Passenger (previously known as Gomera). A co-production between Romania (42 Km Film), France (Les Films du Worso) and Germany (Komplizen Film), Porumboiu’s latest finds Marcela Ursu as a producer and a host of notable co-producers, including Maren Ade, Sylvie Pialat, Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach. Dp Tudor Mircea reunites with Porumboiu for the fourth time. Described as a dramatic thriller, Porumboiu assembles a notable cast, led by popular Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov, Rodica Lazar, Catrinel Marlon, and famed Catalan director Agusti Villaronga.…...
- 1/6/2019
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Wang Bing’s landmark West of the Tracks and new feature, Dead Souls, screen this weekend in a rare Us retrospective.
Metrograph
Retrospectives of Wang Bing and Bill Duke run this weekend.
Newly restored, Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy screens, as is a print of The Barefoot Contessa,...
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Wang Bing’s landmark West of the Tracks and new feature, Dead Souls, screen this weekend in a rare Us retrospective.
Metrograph
Retrospectives of Wang Bing and Bill Duke run this weekend.
Newly restored, Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy screens, as is a print of The Barefoot Contessa,...
- 11/16/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Quad Cinema
Often considered the most important filmmaker of the last 40 years, Claude Lanzmann is given a retrospective — including his landmark Shoah.
A 20th-anniversary screening of Susan Skoog’s Whatever is held on Saturday.
Metrograph
Newly restored, Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy begins screening.
Two certified classics from Leos Carax are running, while...
Quad Cinema
Often considered the most important filmmaker of the last 40 years, Claude Lanzmann is given a retrospective — including his landmark Shoah.
A 20th-anniversary screening of Susan Skoog’s Whatever is held on Saturday.
Metrograph
Newly restored, Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy begins screening.
Two certified classics from Leos Carax are running, while...
- 11/9/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Autuerism and sports fandom aren’t as far apart from each other as the adherents of either might think. The cinephile and fan are both quick to announce their chosen favorites, accumulate vast bodies of arcane knowledge, and build peculiarly personal relationships with lofty, distant figures, Olympian personalities celebrated as much for individuality and style as sheer ability. Regarding the objects of their passions, both are equally quick to effusive tenderness and vindictive hostility. I am, of course, hardly the first to make this connection. In a 1997 article in Britain’s Neon magazine, Irish comic and then-future Black Books creator Graham Linehan penned a kind of comic fantasy envisioning film lovers as gangs of rival hooligans. “Kieslowski fans are bad enough,” decries Linehan’s narrator, a Greenaway partisan, “but when it comes to the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low, everyone agrees at the end of the...
- 11/8/2018
- MUBI
The beautiful game has one of the lowest bars to entry of any sport in the world. Soccer — which will be called by its proper name, football, from here on in — only requires a ball to play. Any flat surface can be turned into a pitch if you don’t have access to a regulation-sized field. That elegance, and the game’s simple rules, has helped make it a global phenomenon. Outside of the cash and influence of the corrupt bureaucracy of FIFA, soccer endures because the opportunities the sport affords are open to anyone with a passion for the game.
Continue reading ‘Infinite Football’: This Amusing Documentary Shows One Man’s Attempt To Reinvent The Beautiful Game [Review] at The Playlist.
Continue reading ‘Infinite Football’: This Amusing Documentary Shows One Man’s Attempt To Reinvent The Beautiful Game [Review] at The Playlist.
- 11/5/2018
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSLouis Cha, 1924 - 2018Louis Cha, widely regarded as the most influential Chinese martial arts novelist of the 20th century, has died at the age of 94. Notably, several of Cha's best-selling wuxia novels—written under the pen name Jin Yong—have been adapted into films, including King Hu's The Swordsman and Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time. Parasite, Bong Joon-ho's follow-up to Okja, has finished shooting ahead of its 2019 release. Bong has stated that "despite the title, the film does not include either parasites or alien creatures," though these stills certainly point to creeping tensions.Here is a first look at Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-sik & Park So-dam that wrapped last month!! #기생충 pic.twitter.com/C9jjkjoWhK— Jason Bechervaise (@Jasebechervaise) October 23, 2018 We're naturally saddened to hear...
- 10/31/2018
- MUBI
"This is football version 2.0." Grasshopper Film has released the first official trailer for a documentary titled Infinite Football, which first premiered at the Berlin Film Festival this year to many rave reviews. A lot of my friends said this was one of the best films of the festival. This Romanian doc by filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu is kind of, sort of, about the game of football - also known as soccer in America - though it's not really. The film is about a former Romanian soccer star, now a major politician, who dreams of revising and updating the game to prevent injuries. Described as a "hilarious, typically incisive" doc where "all roads lead to football, but all roads lead away from it too, to land ownership issues, to orange farms in Florida, to political utopia and the traces left by life, to version 2.0, 3.1, 4.7, to infinity." This is definitely a must watch.
- 10/30/2018
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
It’s only been around for five years, but The Art of the Real has already established itself as one of the world’s most essential showcases for game-changing, rule-breaking, genre-busting new cinema. Dedicated to films that blur the line between fact and fiction — or reveal to us how blurred that line is and always will be — this annual Film Society of Lincoln Center series is the kind of thing that makes you want to put quotation marks around reductive terms like “documentary” and “non-fiction.” These are unclassifiable works of freeform cinematic innovation, movies that are more accurately defined by their inclusion in this program than they are by any of the words we often use to describe them.
The 2018 edition of The Art of the Real is predictably stacked with strong work, from a movie about a tennis player that reimagines how we think about sports, to a movie...
The 2018 edition of The Art of the Real is predictably stacked with strong work, from a movie about a tennis player that reimagines how we think about sports, to a movie...
- 4/28/2018
- by David Ehrlich and Jude Dry
- Indiewire
Art of the Real, Fslc's annual celebration of non-fiction cinema is back and remains my most anticipated cinema event even in the city that is not in short supply of great film series all year round. An amazing array of genre-defining, ever expanding cinematic experiments are presented to satiate your inquisitive cinematic minds! This year's lineup includes Infinite Football by Corneliu Porumboiu, Sergei Loznitsa’s Victory Day, Kazuhiro Soda's Inland Factory, and many more. Again, Art of the Real is an immensely rewarding cinematic experience both in form and content. Don't miss it! Art of the Real runs from April 26 through May 6, 2018 at Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. Please visit Fgsc for more info. Here is preview of six notable films...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
- 4/24/2018
- Screen Anarchy
Below you will find our favorite films of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, as well as an index of our coverage.AwardsTOP Pickstop 10(1) Transit (Christian Petzold)(2) Infinite Football (Corneliu Porumboiu)(3) An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo)(4) The Waldheim Waltz (Ruth Beckermann)(5) Season of the Devil (Lav Diaz)(6) In the Realm of Perfection (Julian Faraut)(7) Classical Period (Ted Fendt)(8) Notes on an Appearance (Ricky D'Ambrose)(9) Inland Sea (Kazuhiro Soda) & Unsane (Steven Soderbergh)(Contributors: Annabel Ivy Brady-Brown, Giovanni Marchini Camia, Celluloid Liberation Front, Adam Cook, David Hudson, Jordan Cronk, Daniel Kasman, Olaf Möller, Michael Pattison, Richard Porton, Christopher Small, Barbara Wurm)Daniel Kasman(1) Season of the Devil (2) The Waldheim Waltz (3) Grass (4) Jamila (5) Foreboding (6) Transit (7) An Elephant Sitting Still (8) Infinite Football (9) In the Realm of Perfection (10) Inland SeaADAM Cook(1) Infinite Football (2) The Tree (3) Season of the Devil (4) Transit (5) Grass (6) In the Realm of Perfection (7) Optimism (8) Isle of Dogs (9) The Waldheim Waltz (10) L.
- 3/6/2018
- MUBI
With the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival wrapped, we’ve highlighted our favorite films from the festival. Make sure to stay tuned in the coming months as we learn about distribution news for the titles. Check out our favorites below.
An Elephant Sitting Still (Bo Hu)
The trick to getting the most out of the Berlin Film Festival is to dig deep into its stupendous program spanning 400 films across a multitude of sidebars. Premiering in the Forum section which traditionally favors more experimental/radical forms of filmmaking, Chinese writer/director Bo Hu’s feature debut An Elephant Sitting Still is the work of raw, intimidating talent driven by a creative fury that would likely daunt most competition titles. Unmissable for anyone craving the gritty realism and independent spirit of pre-00’s Chinese cinema. Fair warning: this is decidedly not the feel-good movie of the year. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Grass (Hong...
An Elephant Sitting Still (Bo Hu)
The trick to getting the most out of the Berlin Film Festival is to dig deep into its stupendous program spanning 400 films across a multitude of sidebars. Premiering in the Forum section which traditionally favors more experimental/radical forms of filmmaking, Chinese writer/director Bo Hu’s feature debut An Elephant Sitting Still is the work of raw, intimidating talent driven by a creative fury that would likely daunt most competition titles. Unmissable for anyone craving the gritty realism and independent spirit of pre-00’s Chinese cinema. Fair warning: this is decidedly not the feel-good movie of the year. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Grass (Hong...
- 2/27/2018
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Berlin Review: Corneliu Porumboiu Returns to the Politics of a Beautiful Game in ‘Infinite Football’
In Romania at the end of the 1980’s–the autumn years of the Ceausescu regime–Adrian Porumboiu worked as a professional referee for the national football league (or however it was referred to at the time). His son Corneliu (born in 1975) would grow up to become a significant filmmaker in the so-called Romanian New Wave of the mid ’00s. In 2014, Corneliu made a movie about his dad called The Second Game in which he narrated over a full 90-minute match that his father had refereed. Through the ever-politicized veil of sport the director was able to talk about the realities of those times. He returns to the beautiful game in 2018 with Infinite Football, a contemporary portrait of a man who suffered a bad injury before his career—at least in his eyes–had the chance to take off.
The man in question is Laurențiu Ginghină, a close friend of the...
The man in question is Laurențiu Ginghină, a close friend of the...
- 2/21/2018
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
Corneliu Porumboiu’s Infinite Football (Fotbal infinit) is definitely a film you could watch in its entirety without thinking it’s a documentary. Staying nicely onside of what feels like a deadpan comedy for a delightfully compact seventy minutes in Berlinale’s Panorama section, it’s an unexpected gem - and one that certainly makes you reconsider the comedic potential of docs as it kookily tells the story of Romanian sporting extraordinaire Laurențiu Ginghină. Unbeknownst to almost all of the world, maverick pioneer Ginghină has been busily reinterpreting the beautiful game for literally decades. Following a career-ending tackle in 1986 - which (rest assured) he describes in vivid length - this one-man sporting institution has been obsessing over ways to refine both the safety and the flow of football....
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[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
- 2/20/2018
- Screen Anarchy
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