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 past round-ups here.
Awaken (Tom Lowe)
Capturing the awe-inspiring wonders of our world has been an endeavor since the dawn of image-making, and with ever-evolving advancements in technology there’s an unparalleled pristineness in one’s ability to record such beauty. In his feature debut Awaken, director Tom Lowe takes this pursuit to heart, traversing the planet with the eye of a treasure hunter, collecting only the most stunning shots imaginable to convey the splendor of where we all collectively call home. The film’s main calling card––being executive produced by Terrence Malick and Godfrey Reggio––inevitably also sets a perhaps unfairly high bar as the film falls short of achieving...
Awaken (Tom Lowe)
Capturing the awe-inspiring wonders of our world has been an endeavor since the dawn of image-making, and with ever-evolving advancements in technology there’s an unparalleled pristineness in one’s ability to record such beauty. In his feature debut Awaken, director Tom Lowe takes this pursuit to heart, traversing the planet with the eye of a treasure hunter, collecting only the most stunning shots imaginable to convey the splendor of where we all collectively call home. The film’s main calling card––being executive produced by Terrence Malick and Godfrey Reggio––inevitably also sets a perhaps unfairly high bar as the film falls short of achieving...
- 4/9/2021
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Martin Scorsese and Bertrand Tavernier on the set of Round Midnight (1986) by Etienne George. French filmmaker and American cinema aficionado Bertrand Tavernier has died at 79. Read Martin Scorsese's moving Instagram tribute to Tavernier, in which he recalls how "he was so passionate that he could exhaust you."The 20th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival, set to take place in June, will have in-person screenings, making it the first North American fest to do so since the start of Covid-19.Recommended VIEWINGA24 has released the official trailer for Janicza Bravo's long-awaited Zola, based on the viral #TheStory by A’Ziah “Zola” King. Mubi's official UK trailer for Limbo, Ben Sharrock's wry and poignant debut feature about a group of new arrivals awaiting the results of their asylum claims. Le Cinéma...
- 3/31/2021
- MUBI
Ollie Ollie Oligarchy: Puiu Weighs the World That Was in Long Form
For what stands as his sixth narrative feature, Malmkrog, Romanian New Wave auteur Cristi Puiu returns to a text he’s obviously fascinated by, the 1900 philosophical publication War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ by Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose works influenced the generation after him more than his own (like Sergei Bulgakov or Lev Shestov). Puiu had mounted an experimental workshop in 2013 which became the film Three Exercises of Interpretation, but this time around, he mounts a loose period piece adaptation of the text, shifting the action to Transylvania and the language to French with a running time of nearly three-and-a-half-hours.…...
For what stands as his sixth narrative feature, Malmkrog, Romanian New Wave auteur Cristi Puiu returns to a text he’s obviously fascinated by, the 1900 philosophical publication War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ by Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose works influenced the generation after him more than his own (like Sergei Bulgakov or Lev Shestov). Puiu had mounted an experimental workshop in 2013 which became the film Three Exercises of Interpretation, but this time around, he mounts a loose period piece adaptation of the text, shifting the action to Transylvania and the language to French with a running time of nearly three-and-a-half-hours.…...
- 3/30/2021
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Sovereign Film Distribution has acquired U.K. and Ireland rights to writer-director Cristi Puiu’s Berlin and Seville winner “Malmkrog” (Manor House).
Puiu won the best director award at the Encounters section of the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, in addition to best screenplay and the Golden Giraldillo Award for best film at the Seville European Film Festival.
An adaptation of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s book “Three Conversations,” “Malmkrog” follows a politician, a countess, a general and his wife as they gather over the Christmas holidays in a manor house to discuss death, war, progress and morality. As the debate becomes more heated, cultural differences become increasingly apparent and the mood grows tense.
The film is billed as a unique mixture of “Downton Abbey” and Dostoyevsky, as it recalls the drawing room masterworks of Max Ophüls, and the stark cerebral work of Ingmar Bergman.
The cast includes Frederic Schulz-Richard, Agathe Bosch,...
Puiu won the best director award at the Encounters section of the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, in addition to best screenplay and the Golden Giraldillo Award for best film at the Seville European Film Festival.
An adaptation of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s book “Three Conversations,” “Malmkrog” follows a politician, a countess, a general and his wife as they gather over the Christmas holidays in a manor house to discuss death, war, progress and morality. As the debate becomes more heated, cultural differences become increasingly apparent and the mood grows tense.
The film is billed as a unique mixture of “Downton Abbey” and Dostoyevsky, as it recalls the drawing room masterworks of Max Ophüls, and the stark cerebral work of Ingmar Bergman.
The cast includes Frederic Schulz-Richard, Agathe Bosch,...
- 1/19/2021
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
It’s difficult to exactly quantify the impact of Cristi Puiu’s second feature. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a film about an ambulance worker’s attempts to get care for a dying man against the backdrop of a disinterested and bureaucratic healthcare system. It won Puiu the main award in Un Certain Regard at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival; kick-started what would become known as the Romanian New Wave; and paved the way for his compatriot Christian Mungiu to win the Palme d’Or with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days just two years after. If Mungiu’s film was Romania’s Parasite, in a sense Puiu’s was its Oldboy.
His third feature, Aurora (2010), explored some similar themes but over the last decade Puiu branched out to experimental literary adaptation and dialogue-heavy chamber piece. Those two threads come together in Malmkrog, an adaptation of three conversations by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov,...
His third feature, Aurora (2010), explored some similar themes but over the last decade Puiu branched out to experimental literary adaptation and dialogue-heavy chamber piece. Those two threads come together in Malmkrog, an adaptation of three conversations by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov,...
- 3/25/2020
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
The 70th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival is now in the books. The jury, featuring Jeremy Irons, Bérénice Bejo, Bettina Brokemper, Annemarie Jacir, Kenneth Lonergan, Luca Marinelli, and Kleber Mendonça Filho, shared their award winners–and now here’s a look at what we admired the most during the festival.
Featuring a fair bit of cross-over, check out our favorites below and return for more coverage (including reviews and interviews). Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter for updates as these films get distribution and release dates.
Dau. Natasha
It is no use of hyperbole to suggest that Dau. Natasha already looks like one of the most provocative art films ever made. The first strictly theatrical feature to be released from Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s gargantuan, unprecedented Dau project (12 other films were shown at an immersive exhibition in Paris last year), it offers the viewer a kind of...
Featuring a fair bit of cross-over, check out our favorites below and return for more coverage (including reviews and interviews). Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter for updates as these films get distribution and release dates.
Dau. Natasha
It is no use of hyperbole to suggest that Dau. Natasha already looks like one of the most provocative art films ever made. The first strictly theatrical feature to be released from Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s gargantuan, unprecedented Dau project (12 other films were shown at an immersive exhibition in Paris last year), it offers the viewer a kind of...
- 3/5/2020
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
I can’t think of a better start to the Berlin Film Festival than Raúl Ruiz’s The Tango of a Widower and its Distorting Mirror (1967/2020), an eerie, imaginative story about a despotic professor, haunted by the ghost of his deceased wife, and which is also a tribute to experimental cinema. The film was to be Ruiz’s debut feature, but he never completed it. Ruiz’s widow, Valeria Sarmiento, who was also behind the completion of Ruiz’s other celebrated posthumous project, The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), effectively became its co-director.The film’s plot is quite simple, perhaps even schematic. A renowned professor (Rubén Sotoconil) sees his nightmarish dreams infect reality, assailed by her image in daylight. Wigs move around his apartment—surrealist, sensual, tormenting. In one dream, his nephew removes a wig from his body, as if he just gave birth to it. There’s plenty here to create tension,...
- 2/26/2020
- MUBI
In Malmkrog, a group of Russian aristocrats gather in a grand rural estate to wax philosophical during a long and luxurious dinner party. The film offers seemingly the closest thing to a direct screen staging of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s War and Christianity: The Three Conversations. At 200 minutes, it runs just a few breaths short of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but seldom ever leaves the confines of the decadent surrounding–indeed, the majority takes place in just three rooms. The dialogue sounds as if it has been taken verbatim. The camera hardly moves. We recommend caffeine, or perhaps something stronger.
Malmkrog was directed by Cristi Puiu, a filmmaker of the Romanian New Wave who first appeared on most people’s radars with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in 2005, a film so vital and urgent it seemed to almost singlehandedly propel Romanian cinema to the top of the game for a while.
Malmkrog was directed by Cristi Puiu, a filmmaker of the Romanian New Wave who first appeared on most people’s radars with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in 2005, a film so vital and urgent it seemed to almost singlehandedly propel Romanian cinema to the top of the game for a while.
- 2/22/2020
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
Since Cristi Puiu’s “Malmkrog” means to drown the viewer in a dense and arcane philosophical debate about Good and Evil, the nature of Christ, Europe and the direction of History, let’s add another strand to the discussion: how is cinema put to best use? It’s an especially pertinent question since Puiu’s always stunning use of space and light, so carefully calculated in every shot, so rigidly composed as if he’s used dioramas with dolls to ensure figures and objects will be exactly in the right place, makes even “Malmkrog” a cinematic experience despite a perverse amount of verbiage that demands absolute concentration for nearly three and a half hours. Yet given that he anxiously wants his audience – never more limited than with this film – to follow the calculatedly cruel intellectual jousting between his five main characters,
Perhaps if the voluminous script were first made required reading,...
Perhaps if the voluminous script were first made required reading,...
- 2/21/2020
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
Cristi Puiu’s fourth film makes a virtue of high seriousness as guests at a country house discuss God, man, warfare and evil
Cristi Puiu is the film-maker who spearheaded Romanian new wave 15 years ago with his brilliant The Death of Mr Lazarescu, and then five years later with his dauntingly opaque existential drama Aurora, and after that the strange Sieranevada – the intimate study of a family gathered to honour the death of a father. These realist dramas, considered together, were intelligibly the product of one film-maker in a recognisable – if difficult – style. Ten years ago, in fact, Puiu was talking about a projected “suite” of six such tales, and these appeared to be the first three.
His new feature, however, could not be more different. It is an almost impossibly stark, austere, cerebral and verbose film, running at three hours and 20 minutes, populated by the leisured classes of a distant age.
Cristi Puiu is the film-maker who spearheaded Romanian new wave 15 years ago with his brilliant The Death of Mr Lazarescu, and then five years later with his dauntingly opaque existential drama Aurora, and after that the strange Sieranevada – the intimate study of a family gathered to honour the death of a father. These realist dramas, considered together, were intelligibly the product of one film-maker in a recognisable – if difficult – style. Ten years ago, in fact, Puiu was talking about a projected “suite” of six such tales, and these appeared to be the first three.
His new feature, however, could not be more different. It is an almost impossibly stark, austere, cerebral and verbose film, running at three hours and 20 minutes, populated by the leisured classes of a distant age.
- 2/21/2020
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for Cristi Puiu’s “Malmkrog,” the opening film of the Berlin Film Festival’s new competitive strand, Encounters. Shellac is handling world sales.
“Malmkrog” is set at the manor house of an aristocratic landowner in Transylvania. Among the handpicked guests who have arrived to spend the Christmas holidays are a politician, a young countess, and a general with his wife. Over sumptuous meals and parlor games, the guests discuss progress and morality, death and the Antichrist. As the debate grows more heated, cultural rifts between them begin to emerge, and the climate becomes increasingly tense.
The 200-minute drama is based on a text by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. “The problems posed by adapting a real event for the screen are to a large extent contiguous with those that arise in the case of creating a film version of a literary text,...
“Malmkrog” is set at the manor house of an aristocratic landowner in Transylvania. Among the handpicked guests who have arrived to spend the Christmas holidays are a politician, a young countess, and a general with his wife. Over sumptuous meals and parlor games, the guests discuss progress and morality, death and the Antichrist. As the debate grows more heated, cultural rifts between them begin to emerge, and the climate becomes increasingly tense.
The 200-minute drama is based on a text by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. “The problems posed by adapting a real event for the screen are to a large extent contiguous with those that arise in the case of creating a film version of a literary text,...
- 2/17/2020
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
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