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Lee Daniels is anything but typical. He’s made sobering character studies (“Precious”), historical and political epics (“The Butler”), and even supernatural horror films (“The Deliverance”), so when it comes to his choices in the Criterion Closet, it’s not surprising to learn his range of influence would be so eclectic. Daniels himself calls the space a “candy store” at the top of his video, signaling a visit that will see him lean into his varied taste and take home selections that encompass Italian surrealism, the work of John Waters, and 1950s noir. First in the bag for Daniels was Essential Fellini, a box set that features 14 of the beloved filmmaker’s work.

“Fellini is my god, my hero,” said Daniels. “Fellini made it possible for me to think that I was a filmmaker because none of his stuff makes sense really, at the end of the day, but it does make sense.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s whirlwind career of 40-plus movies made within just over a dozen years kicked off with Love Is Colder Than Death. It ended, all too soon, with a sendoff that may as well have been called Death Is Hotter Than Love. Even if it hadn’t wound up being Fassbinder’s final cinematic will and testament, Querelle, an uber-horny but otherwise unorthodox adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest, would still feel like a film precariously perched between rowdy, profane life and that liminal, insatiable zone that always follows la petite mort.

But because the timeline spanning the film’s completion to its release was bisected by Fassbinder’s death from a drug overdose, it’s nearly impossible to avoid overlaying the gorgeously wrecked glamour of his entire career onto the film, draping the virtue of his carnal vices over a package that’s already prodigiously overstuffed.

These days, queer movies come in all shapes and styles, from handsomely mounted biopics (“Milk”) to kid-friendly rom-coms. That’s a good thing; you want queer art to enjoy variety and novelty, and appeal to all audiences in the LGBTQ community. But sometimes, you want something very specific from a queer film; you want it to be sexy as hell.

When queer movies started bubbling into the mainstream in the early ’90s via movies like “Philadelphia,” they tended to be slightly sanitized, lacking much in the way of physical depictions of intimacy. That’s changed as the years have gone on. Thanks to films like “Brokeback Mountain,” there’s now a ton of modern examples of queer films that aren’t shy about their leads getting it on. But there’s a longer history of sexy queer cinema that goes back well before the ’90s, even if many of those...

The Criterion Collection has announced its slate of releases for June 2024, which is headlined by 4K restorations of two of the boutique label’s most popular Blu-rays and four new high profile additions to the collection.

David Lynch’s landmark 1986 neo-noir horror film, which marked his first collaboration with Laura Dern alongside her future “Twin Peaks: The Return” co-star Kyle McLachlan, will be re-released by Criterion with a new 4K transfer. It joins Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Lost Highway,” “Inland Empire,” “The Elephant Man,” and “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” in the Criterion 4K library.

Also getting the 4K treatment is Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which sees Johnny Depp playing Hunter S. Thompson stand-in Raoul Duke in a psychedelic adaptation of the landmark countercultural novel.

New additions to the collection include Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s “Bound,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Querelle,” Emilio Fernández’s “Victims of Sin,...

Creo has announced the jury for the 2024 Sony Future Filmmaker Awards.

Director Justin Chadwick serves as chair for the second year in a row. He is joined on the jury by Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, co-founders and co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics; cinematographer Rob Hardy ASC, Bsc; cinematographer Kate Reid Bsc; cinematographer Robert Primes ASC; and Australian filmmaker Unjoo Moon.

Chadwick said, “It is such a pleasure to return as Chair of this new prestigious panel of decorated creatives. Last year, we brought to the forefront 30 exceptionally talented filmmakers from across the world, each of whom had the unique chance to access the inner workings of the industry in Los Angeles, opening doors to career-launching opportunities. From my own experience, the art of the short film is by no means one to be underestimated, and I look forward to discovering more brilliant, talented individuals through this upcoming selection.”

In...

The Criterion Collection is known for their dedication to championing classic and contemporary movies we should all be seeing, showcasing them with exquisite transfers and film school-level special features. But when it comes to their streaming service The Criterion Channel, the catalog is a bit looser. And it got weird and worse(?) this month, as they added a 14-title retrospective of the Golden Raspberry Awards. Titled “And the Razzie Goes To…”, Criterion’s grouping compiles 14 movies that come complete with bees, turkey time and whatever the hell Tom Green was doing for the duration of Freddy Got Fingered.

Here is the full list of Razzie flicks now available on The Criterion Channel: Cruising (1980), Heaven’s Gate (1980), Xanadu (1980), Querelle (1982), Under the Cherry Moon (1986), Ishtar (1987), Cocktail (1988), Showgirls (1995), Barb Wire (1996), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Freddy Got Fingered (2001), Swept Away (2002), Gigli (2003), and The Wicker Man (2006). That’s more than 80 Razzie nominations, ranging from Showgirls’s...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

And the Razzie Goes to . . .

As much as we hate to give Razzies any sort of promotion, The Criterion Channel has a new series to show just how wrong the execrable organization has been over the past decades. Launching today, they are spotlighting comedic gems like Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered, Elaine May’s Ishtar, and Neil Labute’s The Wicker Man, alongside Cruising, Heaven’s Gate, Xanadu, Querelle, Under the Cherry Moon, Cocktail, Showgirls, Barb Wire, The Blair Witch Project, Swept Away and Gigli.

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

BlackBerry (Matt Johnson)

In BlackBerry, the rise of a blue-chip tech company sets the stage for the dissolution of a longstanding friendship. Sound familiar? Just wait ‘til you hear the score.

There is, a critic will argue, a great deal of value in finding and discussing the worst films of the year. All the films released in a given epoch are a reflection of the trends and ideas that produced them, and scoring the bottom of the barrel for the worst filmmaking, the worst ideas, and the most misguided thinking will provide a valuable analysis of where we are as a society. Worst-of lists are important and vital and should be written with enthusiasm. They also let critics blow off steam a little bit; we don't have the luxury to skip bad movies or avoid talking about the ones we hate. It's our job.

The Golden Raspberries, or the Razzies for short, however, lost sight of that value a while back. The annual Razzies announcement is usually a snarky affair that only serves to pick on the year's least popular blockbusters,...

Some apotheosis of film culture has been reached with Freddy Got Fingered‘s addition to the Criterion Channel. Three years after we interviewed Tom Green about his consummate film maudit, it’s appearing on the service’s Razzie-centered program that also includes the now-admired likes of Cruising, Heaven’s Gate, Querelle, and Ishtar; the still-due likes of Under the Cherry Moon; and the more-contested Gigli, Swept Away, and Nicolas Cage-led Wicker Man. In all cases it’s an opportunity to reconsider one of the lamest, thin-gruel entities in modern culture.

A Jane Russell retro features von Sternberg’s Macao, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Raoul Walsh’s The Tall Men and The Revolt of Mamie Stover; streaming premieres will be held for Yuen Woo-ping’s Dreadnaught, Claire Simon’s Our Body, Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil, the recently restored Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles, and The Passion of Rememberance.

Noted Hollywood publicist Mickey Cottrell passed away on January 1, 2024, at the age of 79. He was known throughout the 1990s for his advocacy of independent film, his knowledge of queer history, and his wild blowout parties. He promoted films like Jonatha Couette's "Tarnation," Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire," and Philip Noyce's "Dead Calm," as well as "Weekend," "Querelle," and "Earth Girls Are Easy." 

Cottrell was so well-liked in the industry, and such an outsize character, that he would occasionally appear in films. In fact, he has several dozen acting credits to his name, many of them in indie queer films. He played a corpse in John Cameron Mitchell's "Shortbus," a barfly in "The Fluffer," and a mincing French aristocrat in league with demons in "Hellraiser: Bloodline." He was also the one who got to say "Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!" in Tim Burton's "Ed Wood." His first acting...

Mickey Cottrell, a veteran publicist for independent films known as a champion of filmmakers and actors, died Monday at the Motion Picture Hospital in Woodland Hills, his sister Suzy Cottrell confirmed. He was 79.

Cottrell had returned to Los Angeles in 2019 after living with his sister in Arkansas while he recovered from a stroke he suffered in 2016.

His sister remembered him on Facebook, writing, “My adorable, fun, critical, foodie, particular, brilliant, loving brother passed on to the next life early on New Year’s Day. He was smiling when he died. Mickey Cottrell will be missed by many.”

A fixture at film festivals, he was remembered by friends on Facebook as a generous and sassy raconteur, a devoted mentor, the “life of the party” who threw star-studded Sundance parties in the 1990s and an expert on gay Hollywood history.

Cottrell also acted in numerous small roles over the years, including turns...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSTiny, a Canadian technology holding company, has completed a majority acquisition of the film-oriented social networking platform Letterboxd, Business Wire reports. Letterboxd’s founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow will continue to lead the business independently as the company scales up.REMEMBERINGThe Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.Michael Gambon has died aged 82. A notable stage actor, Gambon appeared in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) before taking on memorable roles in Michael Mann's The Insider (1999), Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001), and the Harry Potter films, in which he took over the role of Albus Dumbledore from Richard Harris. "Gambon left school aged 15 and, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not receive any formal training at drama school," writes Chris Wiegand in his Guardian obituary.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

The Mother and the Whore begins a run in its 4K restoration; Scratch plays for free Friday night in Damrosch Park.

Museum of the Moving Image

E.T., The Green Ray, Risky Business, and Blow Out play on 35mm in a summer movie series; The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Great Muppet Caper, and Querelle also screen.

Bam

Juliet Berto’s superb directorial debut Neige begins playing in a long-overdue restoration.

Film Forum

A celebration of Ozu’s 120th birthday continues with a massive series; It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World plays this Sunday.

Roxy Cinema

35mm prints of Portrait of Jason and The Rocky Horror Picture Show screen, while Happy Together plays; “City Dudes” plays on Saturday.

Anthology Film Archives

Buster Keaton and Ken Jacobs screen in Essential Cinema.

IFC Center

The David Lynch...

Masculinity as a subject isn’t always framed kindly in narratives documenting the early exploration and discovery of the queer self. After all, its aspirational qualities for closeted boys are too often complicated by the threats associated with not having it. Yet the failed attempt at masculine performance can sometimes recast our desire to be different kind of men into an appetite for looking at them instead, and in his essay collection The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, culture writer and critic Manuel Betancourt explores the development of his queer male gaze through candid and wide-ranging reflections on the pop-cultural influences that formed his early education in how to want and how to be.

Betancourt begins with a meditation on his early fascination with the male form specifically as represented in the Disney films of his childhood, as his reluctance to...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

BlackBerry (Matt Johnson)

In BlackBerry, the rise of a blue-chip tech company sets the stage for the dissolution of a longstanding friendship. Sound familiar? Just wait ‘til you hear the score. Directed by Matt Johnson, it tells the true story of Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, software engineers who founded the company Rim in the mid-80s and later invented a cellphone that could handle email. The film begins on the day when they meet Jim Basillie (Glenn Howerton), a Rottweiler who, alongside Lazaridis’ genius, turned Rim’s invention (only later christened BlackBerry) into the world’s most ubiquitous mobile device––at least for a time. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

The Hole in the Fence (Joaquín del Paso...

It was Paul Gauguin, France’s most celebrated Polynesian tourist, who once wrote of “learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.” It’s a void, he wrote, in which other senses and sensory awarenesses are heightened, amplifying his sense of loneliness and separation from others: “The inhabitants of the district and I mutually watched each other, and the distance remained the same.” Gauguin isn’t mentioned in “Pacifiction,” Albert Serra’s languorous, meandering tour of modern-day Tahiti, though those words echo through its survey of the island’s distanced, distracted residents — even if the nights here aren’t as silent as the artist might remember, disrupted as they are with tinny discotheque beats, darkened trysts and the hovering, unidentified threat of nuclear warfare.

The first film by cultish Catalan provocateur Serra to crack Cannes’s competition lineup, “Pacifiction” is an unhurried, 164-minute tropical tour that is sort of...

The German festival opens tonight with the premiere of Oskar Roehler’s Enfant Terrible.

The international premiere of Enfant Terrible, Oskar Roehler’s tribute to the legendary New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder kicks off the mostly physical edition of the Filmfest Hamburg in Germany today, September 24.

Enfant Terrible was the only German film to be selected for this year’s Cannes 2020 label and Hamburg is the first time the film will screen in front of a live audience. Weltkino is releasing in German cinemas from October 1.

Roehler will be in town for the opening night of the mostly physical festival.

The German festival opens tonight with the premiere of Oskar Roehler’s Enfant Terrible.

The international premiere of Enfant Terrible, Oskar Roehler’s tribute to the legendary New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder kicks off the mostly physical edition of the Hamburg Filmfest in Germany today, September 24.

Enfant Terrible was the only German film to be selected for this year’s Cannes 2020 label and Hamburg is the first time the film will screen in front of a live audience. Weltkino is releasing in German cinemas from October 1.

Roehler will be in town for the opening night of the mostly physical festival.

German cinema looks set for an exciting year with forthcoming works that include a high-profile Cannes selection celebrating one of Germany’s most iconic filmmakers, an expressionistic thriller set in 1920s Vienna, a tale of Nazi seduction and a new Thomas Mann adaptation.

The Covid-19 pandemic dashed the excitement of a splashy Cannes premiere for Oskar Roehler’s “Enfant Terrible,” part of the festival’s Official Selection, but the film is nevertheless certain to generate buzz with its portrayal of legendary filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and his turbulent film career that spanned 1969 to 1982.

In making the film, Roehler found inspiration in Fassbinder’s own work.

“We didn’t want to do your standard biopic,” says producer Markus Zimmer, managing director of Bavaria Filmproduktion. “I think we did come very close to what Fassbinder would have made out of his own life. We tried to be in line with the artistic...

Stars: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub, Kiddy Smile, Claude Gajan Maull, Giselle Palmer, Taylor Kastle, Thea Carla Schott, Sharleen Temple, Lea Vlamos, Alaia Alsafir, Kendall Mugler, Lakdhar Dridi, Adrien, Sissoko, Mamadou Bathily, Alou Sidibe, Ashley Biscette, Vince Galliot Cumant | Written and Directed by Gaspar Noé

On its theatrical release the posters for Gaspar Noé’s Climax proudly trumpet that “it’s Fame directed by the Marquis de Sade with a Steadicam”, a gift of a quote from the Variety review. Joyfully, that line turns out to be surprisingly accurate, and Climax proves that French cinema’s enfant terrible has lost none of his power to shock or enthrall.

In typically perverse Noé fashion, Climax opens with a post-credits sting, an overhead shot in which a bloodied woman staggers through the snow before collapsing, her twitching movements making snow angels. It then cuts to the end credits (including multiple music...

Stars: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub, Kiddy Smile, Claude Gajan Maull, Giselle Palmer, Taylor Kastle, Thea Carla Schott, Sharleen Temple, Lea Vlamos, Alaia Alsafir, Kendall Mugler, Lakdhar Dridi, Adrien, Sissoko, Mamadou Bathily, Alou Sidibe, Ashley Biscette, Vince Galliot Cumant | Written and Directed by Gaspar Noé

The posters for Gaspar Noé’s Climax proudly trumpet that “it’s Fame directed by the Marquis de Sade with a Steadicam”, a gift of a quote from the Variety review. Joyfully, that line turns out to be surprisingly accurate, and Climax proves that French cinema’s enfant terrible has lost none of his power to shock or enthrall.

In typically perverse Noé fashion, Climax opens with a post-credits sting, an overhead shot in which a bloodied woman staggers through the snow before collapsing, her twitching movements making snow angels. It then cuts to the end credits (including multiple music track listings) and a number of captions,...

What critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed the “New Queer Cinema” encountered little but praise (plus some attention-getting damnation from political conservatives) with such early ’90s titles as “Swoon,” “My Own Private Idaho,” “The Living End,” “Paris Is Burning,” and so forth. But by mid-decade the vogue had run long enough that even gay audiences felt less inclined to embrace every creative effort, giving a relatively cold shoulder to Steve McLean’s “Postcards From America” (1994) and Todd Verow’s “Frisk.” Both were adapted from edgy gay lit figures — the former from autobiographical writings by David Wojnarowicz (who’d died of AIDS), the latter from a typically violent, queasy novel by Dennis Cooper.

These films look better now than most critics or viewers allowed then. The revulsion “Frisk” was greeted with (at a time when gay films were expected to provide some measure of reassuring uplift) only emboldened Verow as a since-highly-prolific director of microbudget features,...

Gaspar Noé has probably never been likened to Lazarus before – or any other saint, for that matter – but he’s fully earned himself the comparison with Climax, which constitutes a miraculous comeback after the nadir that was Love. It has all the in-your-face trademarks of the Noé brand, but here they’re packaged in a compact, expertly crafted horror flick that transcends its puerility to achieve something altogether sublime.

The immediately entrancing prelude provides a moderate intimation of what’s to come. A blinding, total whiteness is revealed to be a top-down drone shot of a snowy landscape when a girl staggers into the frame, bloodied and screaming, and then falls to the ground, flailing her arms to make a grotesque snow angel. After observing this spectacle for a little while longer, the drone flies on, and that’s the last blood we’ll see for the next hour or so.

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...

French actress Jeanne Moreau has died aged 89.

She was found dead at her home in Paris, the district’s mayor told AFP.

Moreau’s hugely successful career included roles in Elevator To The Gallows and Lovers (both directed by Louis Malle), Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte and Beyond The Clouds, Luis Buñuel’s Diary Of A Chambermaid and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle.

Her most famous role was perhaps in François Truffaut’s New Wave classic Jules et Jim, a hugely influential international hit.

Moreau won the best actress prize at Cannes for Seven Days… Seven Nights in 1960, a best foreign actress Bafta for Viva Maria! in 1965 and was awarded the Bafta Fellowship in 1996.

She was also honoured with a Cesar for best actress, for The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea in 1992, and continued acting into her 80s.

French [link=nm...

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

by Daniel Walber

The films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, though they are many and varied, almost always have striking production design. The obvious examples include the ‘70s scifi chic of World on a Wire and the opulent apartment of Petra von Kant, but it's true of his whole catalogue. The design of Querelle is as bold as it is aroused. And as of this week it’s new to FilmStruck, a place where you can find tons of design classics (like La Ronde and Great Expectations, two of my favorites).

Querelle got terrible reviews when it opened in 1982. It’s often considered an oddity of excess at the end of a career built on precision, an oversexed and underwritten mess with little to say and too much to show.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is showing March 28 - April 27, 2017 in the United Kingdom in the series Fassbinder: The Exploitability of Feelings.By now many will have encountered Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (German: Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) even if they are not hardcore devotees of the director’s oeuvre. Along with his Brd trilogy, Ali stands as one of Fassbinder’s most acclaimed and viewed works. The film follows 60-year-old cleaning woman Emmi (Brigitte Mira) who becomes involved with much younger Moroccan mechanic Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) after one of his friends dares him to dance with her when she walks alone into the bar one rainy evening. Ali has been frequently praised for the moving performances of its leads and for how it so effectively portrays...

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Courtesy of Janus Film.On the occasion of a comprehensive retrospective the Tiff Bell Lightbox (October 28 - December 23), the need to summarize the thirty plus films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder seems not just daunting, but reductive. How to simplify someone who both evolved and contradicted himself? While typically turning out three films per year between 1966 and his death in 1982, the year 1974 seems like one of the German director’s most unified, at least in terms of one preoccupation: marriage. This particular year seems as possibly a mid-way between Fassbinder’s working out-the-kinks genre exercises (The American Soldier, Love Is Colder Than Death) and the later, lavish international co-productions based on esteemed literary works (Despair, Querelle). The diversity upon which the holy union is depicted can be detected if just judging by each of the three’s own source material; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a...

Back in May, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presented the first part of the most complete retrospective of work by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in New York in over a decade. Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist (Part 2) is now running through November 26 and we're collecting reviews and video related to Despair, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, Die dritte Generation, Lili Marleen, Lola, Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, Querelle and many more. » - David Hudson...

Back in May, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presented the first part of the most complete retrospective of work by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in New York in over a decade. Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist (Part 2) is now running through November 26 and we're collecting reviews and video related to Despair, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, Die dritte Generation, Lili Marleen, Lola, Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, Querelle and many more. » - David Hudson...

I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros)

Directed by Pedro Almodovar

Written by Pedro Almodovar

2013, Spain

For three decades, Pedro Almodovar has been the most internationally successful purveyor of queer cinema. His first film, 1980’s Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, was released just two years before Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s too-soon swan-song, Querelle. Though the directors possess distinctly different approaches to the medium (Almodovar hasn’t yet gone sci-fi ala World on A Wire, for instance), their films were among the first brashly and unapologetically queer films that were both critically accepted and widely seen. Fassbinder’s films, operating under the New German Cinema umbrella, aggressively proclaimed their institutional critique by way of difficult, at times unpalatable imagery (Remember In A Year of Seven Moons?), while Almodovar’s commentary is often, but no less importantly, couched beneath the artifice of camp and melodrama. Because Almodovar oftentimes...

Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake, which played in the Un Certain Regard section at the 66th Cannes Film Festival and which Mubi's Adam Cook has written about here, remains one of the early stand-out titles. Set in and around a southern French gay cruising spot that's situated on the banks of a lake, the film charts the romantic intrigues of a disparate group of men whose rampant lust and desire transport them to strange and dangerous places. Recalling Jarman and Fassbinder as much as more classical French dramatists such as Éric Rohmer, this is Guiraudie's sixth feature film.

David Jenkins: What were the literary and cinematic inspirations for Stranger by the Lake?

Alain Guiraudie: I'm not sure I had any direct cinematic influences, but before I wrote it I re-read Jean Genet's Querelle and also re-watched the film by Fassbinder. It was more to make...

German actor best known for his roles in the films of Fassbinder

Filmgoers familiar with the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder will certainly know Günther Kaufmann, who has died of a heart attack aged 64. Kaufmann had parts great and small in more than a dozen of the prolific German director's movies. He was what the Germans call a "Besatzungskind", one of the many children born between 1945 and 1949 as a result of relationships between German women and American soldiers. Kaufmann's black GI father, whom he never knew, returned to the Us before he was born in Munich. According to Fassbinder: "Günther thinks Bavarian, feels Bavarian and speaks Bavarian. And that's why he gets a shock every morning when he looks in the mirror." Kaufmann, whom Fassbinder always called "my Bavarian negro", played an important role in his life.

They first met in the autumn of 1969 on the set of Volker Schlöndorff's television film of Baal,...

. .

Ja from Mnpp here. This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second-to-last film, the glorious Veronika Voss. The film is the final piece in his "Brd Trilogy" (Brd stands for "Bundesrepublik Deutschland," the official name of West Germany and of the united contemporary Germany"), which includes The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola. It was released at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear. Anyone a fan? It's basically his methadone-drenched take on Sunset Boulevard, and one of the most beautiful of Fassbinder's films (which is saying a lot) - the blackest-black-and-whitest-white cinematography by frequent collaborator Xaver Schwarzenberger is a dazzling thing. . . The film's star Rosel Zech, seen up top dialing a phone and smoking like nobody's business - she spends a lot of the movie doing both, and she does them magnificently - just passed away last September, we briefly memorialized her at Mnpp.

The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer's semi-autobiographical off-Broadway play about a New Yorker confronted with AIDS in the early years of the pandemic, has been a perennial "movie project." In the last couple of decades, Oscar winners Barbra Streisand and John Schlesinger have at some point in time announced they were going to tackle it, but to date no film version of The Normal Heart has reached the production stages. [Photo: Matt Bomer.] Now, enter Glee creator and movie director Ryan Murphy (Running with Scissors, Eat Pray Love), who optioned the film rights to the play last summer following its Broadway revival success: The Normal Heart won Tonys for Best Revival, Best Supporting Actor (John Benjamin Hickey), and Best Supporting Actress (Ellen Barkin). Murphy apparently hasn't been sitting idly. According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Normal Heart already has a cast: Eat Pray Love's Julia Roberts (who'll next be seen as the...

Too bad the critical symposium in the new, Winter 2012 issue of Cineaste isn't online. Participants evidently include Gianni Amelio, Olivier Assayas, Costa-Gavras, Robert Greenwald, and Sally Potter, "among others," but until we get our hands on the print edition, we'll have to make do with what is online, which, after all, is plenty: Patrick Z McGavin on Dave Kehr's When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Richard James Havis on Kyung Hyun Kim's Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, Andrew Horton on New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History and Henry K Miller on Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema and The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. And that's just the book reviews.

Besides the interviews with Mona Achache and Charlotte Rampling and festival reports (Locarno, Toronto and Montreal), the 15 reviews include David Sterritt on Kubrick's The Killing (1956), Joseph Luzzi on Raffaello Matarazzo,...

Flamboyant cult German director, belatedly appreciated

After a long, fallow period in German cinema, there emerged, in the late 1960s, a new wave of directors, including Werner Schroeter, who has died of cancer, aged 65. What separated Schroeter from most of his contemporaries, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, was his almost complete rejection of realism, social and political, and his espousal of high camp.

Schroeter lived by Oscar Wilde's dictum: "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess." His mixture of flamboyant, gender-bending minimalism and stylised melodrama, inspired by 19th-century Italian bel canto opera and the music of German romanticism, often juxtaposed with popular song, blurred the distinction between art and kitsch. His eschewal of conventional narrative made him a marginal figure, but towards the end of his life, with several retropectives at festivals and cinematheques, he gained a wider audience of cinephiles. He kept a faithful,...

Jose here to remind you that the magnificent Jeanne Moreau turns 82 today.

Go and celebrate by watching Elevator to the Gallows, Diary of a Chambermaid, The Lovers, Querelle, The Bride Wore Black, Jules and Jim, The Last Tycoon or my favorite La Notte.

Heck you can even watch Ever After if only to enjoy that smokey voice narrating a fairy tale.

If you've seen those and love Jeanne, today's a perfect day to revisit them and if you're not familiar with the woman Orson Welles called "the greatest actress in the world", what are you waiting for?...

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Send it to [email protected]! (Please include your city and state and/or country.)

Q: Dear Monkey, both wingéd and winsome, my other half has beseeched me to ply my troth to him and ask your opinion to settle our dispute. (I'll cut with the thesaurus now.) With The Princess and the Frog recently out, we got to thinking back over some of the other Disney classics, trying to decide which one was the most gay. I say it was Mulan due to the cross-dressing/gender issues theme and the voices of both Harvey Fierstein and George Takei in the cast. He says it was The Little Mermaid because the design for the sea-witch was based on Divine, the drag artist, and Howard Ashman wrote the songs, including the gay-resonant "Part of That World". Are either of us right? – Jeremy, Orem, Utah...