MovieZorg

04/12/2025

As the Cannes film festival come around again, we look back through the archives to see how our critics responded to some of the festival’s most famous prize winners.

01/25/2025

This busy week has seen the passing of Bertrand Blier. The french director directed Miou-Miou, Gérard Depardieu, and Patrick Dewaere—and in smaller roles, Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau—in Going Places (Les Valseuses - 1974). Revisiting the film in a 1990 review (read in the comments), Kevin Thomas wrote that “Blier’s strategies in the telling of his sexual odyssey remain fresh, outrageous, and inspired.” Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), centering again on a ménage à trois with Depardieu and Dewaere, won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Blier was eighty-five.

Bertrand Blier, the provocative Oscar-Winning French Director of 'Going Places' and 'Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,' has died at 85.

01/25/2025

In a whopping dossier for 032c, Cassidy George takes a deep dive into the work of Harmony Korine, who wrote Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) when he was nineteen; directed his first feature, Gummo, two years later; actually had a commercial hit with Spring Breakers in 2013; and confounded audiences in Venice last year with Baby Invasion. “For decades, Korine compared making films to warfare,” writes George. “Now, he has placed him­self on the front lines of an even bigger battle: shaping the future of entertainment. Korine is no longer concerned with disrupting or salvaging cinema. He’s interested only in what comes after it.”

032c is a media and fashion company for the 21st century. Founded by Joerg Koch in 2000, 032c began as a magazine in Berlin.

12/07/2024

“I, with no irony, love Christmas,” announces John Waters. He’s one of twenty-four writers, directors, and actors invited by the Observer New Review to recommend a favorite holiday movie. For Mike Leigh, Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987) is a “joyous masterpiece.” The Laurel and Hardy musical Babes in Toyland (1934) “was the holiday movie growing up, or at least my holiday movie,” says Sean Baker. Alice Rohrwacher goes for Vittorio De Sica’s “sociopolitical fairytale” Miracle in Milan (1951). Richard Eyre and James Ivory both go epic, choosing Ingmar Bergman’s F***y and Alexander (1982) and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), respectively. And Waters’s favorite? Lewis Jackson’s Christmas Evil (1980).

​Count down to Christmas with favourites selected by Sean Baker, Gillian Anderson, John Waters, Mike Leigh, Gurinder Chadha, Will Sharpe and more

12/07/2024

“The allure of the interactive movie has lasted for over half a century, and yet the idea has never quite escaped the bounds of novelty, or the sinking feeling that what’s technologically possible is not necessarily artistically worthwhile,” writes Gabriel Winslow-Yost in the New York Review of Books. “But there is now one exception: the work of Sam Barlow.” In Barlow’s Immortality, players are invited to explore what’s gone wrong in the making of three features. Winslow-Yost: “A view of cinema is being presented as the fragments accumulate: that it inevitably involves violations of trust; that it is inseparable from lust and brutality; that it, and art in general, is nonetheless worth any sacrifice. Presented, but not quite endorsed.”

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

12/07/2024

Collin Brinkmann has been working on a book on late style in film, and he’s posted a sample chapter on Howard Hawks packed with insight, anecdotes, and smartly chosen references. “There are pleasures and profundities galore in early Hawks, but the late films display a quiet maturity that is an integral result of their unhurried, casual, unzeitgeisty temperaments,” writes Brinkmann. Red Line 7000 (1965), for example, is “ostensibly a thrilling picture about the lives and loves of modern racecar drivers, yet the majority of the film consists of remarkably hushed conversations in intimate spaces—quiet moments between friends or lovers in a bed, a car, an office, an empty courtyard, a hospital room, etc. Hawks takes a cast of young, fresh faces in a 1960s environment of hopping bars and roaring racetracks and somehow ends up making one of his most muted, mature, minor key films.”

This piece was originally written as a sample chapter of a book I want to write on late style in film, to go along with a proposal I had wri...

12/07/2024

With his own Breathless (2023), James Benning set out “to play off” the original “because I think its narrative is stupid,” he tells Othon Cinema’s Matthias Kyska. Benning “wanted to make a non-narrative film of the exact same length,” but “that didn’t happen when I set up the camera. Events unfolded in front of it, creating what I would call a ‘found narrative,’ which turned out to be a political found narrative. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is what Godard was interested in with his work.’”

Sometimes, all those images gather together at night when I’m dead tired, and I think, “Oh, that’s a film”.

12/07/2024

Richard Linklater has wrapped shooting on Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white film in French about the making of the New Wave milestone, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), and he tells the Guardian’s Tim Lewis that he “can’t explain how happy I am with that crazy film, I love it so much.”

The American director on the 20-year project he is just beginning, how hitmen don’t exist in real life and why his career would not be possible today