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Mubi's retrospective, The Crimes of Jean-Pierre Melville, is showing from February 2 - March 6, 2018 in the United States.Jean-Pierre Melville (née Grumbach) took his nom de guerre from the American writer Herman Melville during his time fighting in the Resistance. The Moby-Dick scribe was popular in France, thanks in part to Jean Giono’s fawning translation of that mammoth cetacean opus, though it was the psycho-sexual eccentricities of Pierre; or, the Ambiguities that inspired the name change. The filmmaker’s exacting minimalism bears few obvious aesthetic similarities to the writer’s voluble, serpentine prose, and he lacks Herman’s circuitous sense of dark humor, but they did share an affinity for the details of method, and (lonely souls both) for the lives of solitary men. Working usually within constructs of the mystery and thriller genres, the filmmaker obsessed over details, finding small, particular insights in the ephemera and trivialities of routine.

Raúl Ruiz's "last movie," La noche de enfrente, played in Cannes at the Directors' Fortnight, where I saw and wrote about it. The notes below, written on the film by Ruiz and written on Ruiz by the film's producer, François Margolin, were found in the press notes for the production. I thought they were important enough to obtain permission to reprint them here. I hope you enjoy them. —Daniel Kasman

A Statement from Raoul Ruiz

My purpose is to immerse myself in the poetic world of one of the most secretive and surprising writers of Chilean literature, Hernan del Solar. He was a member of the eminent group of writers known as the "Imaginists." The "Imaginists" pushed against the grain of naturalism that reigned in the forties and fifties. They hoped to innovate with an imaginative and contemplative literature that had already been practiced by the likes of A.

Catherine Grant has tweeted a link to the shocking news as reported by El Mostrador: Raúl Ruiz, widely considered the most important filmmaker to have come from Chile, has died in Paris at the age of 70. The funeral will be held on Tuesday morning.

Just a few weeks ago, the New York Times' Ao Scott profiled Ruiz, director of more than "100 films in several languages and also, in his spare time, a theater director and film theorist of some renown in Europe and beyond. He has taught at Harvard, adapted the last volume of Proust into a feature film, transformed several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales into a dark, surrealist comedy starring Marcello Mastroianni and made the life of the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt into a fractured biopic starring John Malkovich. His forays into North America have included the twisty psychological thriller Shattered Image, starring William Baldwin and Anne Parillaud,...

This year's president of the Festival de Cannes Robert De Niro will preside over jury members including fellow actors Jude Law, Uma Thurman and Martina Gusman, directors Olivier Assayas, Johnnie To and Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Chinese producer Nansun Shi and Norwegian critic and writer Linn Ullmann. The nine jury members will hand out the main prizes including the Palme d'Or amongst others for writing, directing and performances. They will follow the path of some of the greatest names in the history of cinema. Many accused Isabelle Huppert of playing favourites when Haneke finally won for his long overdue Palme. De Niro has worked with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn --- will the brotherhood remain intact with a vote going towards Malick?  Unlike any other awards, the Palme d'Or is the most elusive and coveted of them all. The first prize handed out was the Grand Prix in 1949 at the third...

Broadway musical theatre writer who wrote the libretto for Fiddler on the Roof and the screenplay for the 1971 film

Joseph Stein, who has died aged 98, was the last of the great Broadway musical theatre writers coming out of New York revue and television comedy after the second world war. Most famously, he wrote the book, or libretto, for Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Zorba (1968). "There are no limitations to the subject for a musical," Stein once said, "just as there are no limitations to the subject for a play or a novel. The only limitation that I can see is that it has to have an honesty about the relationship of people to each other."

He cast his net wide, shaping not only the Ukrainian shtetl stories of Sholom Aleichem into the tale of Tevye the milkman and his five daughters in Fiddler on the Roof, but also drawing, perhaps surprisingly,...