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Willem Dafoe is the new artistic director of the theater department of the Italian arts organization La Biennale di Venezia, the Venice Biennale, for a two-year term 2025-2026.

“Theater is in fact the original home of his lustrous career,” said Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, chair of the board of directors of the Biennale, which is the foundation that oversees the Venice Film Festival. “One of the founders of the legendary Wooster Group in 1977, the perfect control of his body on stage has always stemmed from discipline, knowledge, passion and a profound awareness of theater. I can’t wait, like everyone else, to be a spectator at the festival he will build as artistic director and — from his lectern as an absolute maestro — to watch the young men and women of the Theater College grow in their art.”

Said Dafoe: “I was first surprised then happy to receive Pietrangelo Buttafuoco’s invitation.” He...

Mick Harvey on The Boys Next Door with Tracy Pew, Phill Calvert, Rowland S Howard and Nick Cave, and the group name change before going to London: “We had some discussions and we came up with The Birthday Party.”

In the first instalment with Mick Harvey we started out discussing his appearance in Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire as a member of Bad Seeds and Crime and the City Solution; Wenders’ latest films, Anselm (Anselm - Das Rauschen der Zeit on Anselm Kiefer) and Perfect Days (Japan’s Oscar submission); Pj Harvey, and Mick’s take on translating and recording four albums of Serge Gainsbourg songs in English, and Jane Birkin (performing at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York).

Mick Harvey with Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze on William Friedkin’s The Birthday Party film (screenplay by Harold Pinter) and the name change: “We thought, yeah, that’s good.

Updated: German film master Wim Wenders was greeted like a rock star in Lyon, France, where he received an honorary tribute on Friday evening (Oct. 21) at the Lumiere Festival, a week-long celebration of classic cinema headed by Cannes festival boss Thierry Fremaux.

“I’ve received prizes in my life but this time it’s different, it’s the the prize of cinema!” said Wenders after stepping on stage to the beat of Texas’ “I Don’t Want a Lover.” Glancing at Fremaux who was standing nearby, Wenders added, with a cheeky smile, “I don’t want to say that a Palme d’Or is nothing. But the Lumiere Prize is unique and I’m proud of it!” Wenders, who won the Palme d’Or with “Paris, Texas,” is considered a Cannes regular. He’s presented his most iconic films there, including “Wings of Desire” which won best director. This year,...

Gayle Hunnicutt, the Texas-born actor known for 1969’s “Marlowe” and her role as Vanessa Beaumont in “Dallas,” died on Aug. 31 in London, according to The Times of London. She was 80.

Hunnicutt played Vanessa Beaumont, an English aristocrat who shares an illegitimate son with Larry Hagman’s J.R. Ewing, in the final three seasons of “Dallas” from 1989 to 1991.

Born on Feb. 6, 1943, in Fort Worth, Texas, Hunnicutt made her television debut in 1966 on the NBC sitcom “Mister Roberts.” She guested on several series in the ’60s, including “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Hey Landlord,” “Love on a Rooftop” and “Get Smart.”

On the film side, Hunnicutt starred opposite James Garner in the 1969 neo-noir crime film “Marlowe,” in which she played television star Mavis Wald. She appeared in more than 30 films during her career, including “The Wild Angels,” “P.J.,” “Freelance,” “Running Scared,” “Target” and “The Legend of Hell House” opposite Roddy McDowell.

Hunnicutt married...

What’s the single best thing about the Venice Film Festival?

The relaxed atmosphere of the festival where you can easily combine meetings and watching film. Maybe it has also to do with the end of the summer…or with the wonderful light…and you can go for a swim!

The impact of the Hollywood strikes on Venice will be…

Regrettably fewer Hollywood-stars on the red carpet but maybe more attention for the films themselves and stars from Europe and other continents.

Best place in Venice to avoid the crowds (and the industry) is…

Considering that I’m a born Venetian and dealing with crowds is one of the biggest challenges of the city, I would prefer to keep this secret for myself. But I would suggest: Take a bicycle and explore the Lido.

The one thing I would change about the Venice Film Festival is…

It’s not really...

The grand theme of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’s fantasy of angels in Berlin before the end of the Cold War, is storytelling in all its forms as a coping mechanism of the human race. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and his more objective but similarly empathetic cohort, Cassiel (Otto Sander), whose wings are only fleetingly shown, regularly swap tales of the small behaviors and interactions they’ve witnessed after traversing the skies and streets to hear “only what is spiritual in people’s minds.”

Among those observed are an elderly poet, Homer (Curt Bois), wandering the sites of his vanished haunts from the pre-Nazi era, wondering why “an epic of peace” has never been sung; Peter Falk, playing some eternal version of himself, arriving to shoot a film and provide a good measure of American soul and humor to Berliners and angels alike; and waitress turned trapeze artist Marion preparing...

Shot when the city seemed forever divided by the wall, this intensely romantic story of an angel who longs for human love is unlike any other

Wim Wenders’ extravagantly wistful, intensely literary romantic fantasy, co-conceived with Peter Handke, is re-released and right now it looks more than anything like an elegiac “city symphony” about Berlin. How extraordinary to think that just two years after this film came out, the Wall and the city’s division into east and west – which had seemed as poetically fixed and immutable as a river shoreline – disappeared. With its amazing crane and helicopter shots, Wenders’ movie swoops and hovers and floats over the city, pointedly surmounting the hated wall, enacting the longing of Berliners to somehow overcome history’s gravity and get over this ugly barrier.

Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander play Damiel and Cassiel, two angels in the sky above Berlin who amuse themselves...

Asian Movie Pulse’s tribute to anime gave me an excuse to revisit “Spirited Away”, often dubbed as one of the greatest anime movies of all time. Iconic Studio Ghibli’s production, which with Oscar (and a bag of other awards) reached a worldwide audience. I remember falling in love with the film at the very first viewing and still adoring it when re-watching it on several other occasions. I remember experiencing it with all senses, captivated by the enthralling and sumptuous vision and the story itself.

But two decades have passed since the premiere. 20 years are a lot in a culture – everchanging, juggling with new tropes and re-telling and re-interpreting the old ones. 20 years is also a lot for a movie watcher – as you build your experience, knowledge and narrative structures that once appeared innovative, lose their shine with time. During this first viewing of Japanese cinema,...

Writer, director and actress Rebecca Miller discusses a few of her favorite films with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002)

The Ballad Of Jack And Rose (2005)

The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee (2009)

Maggie’s Plan (2015)

Explorers (1985)

The Way We Were (1973)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

Annie Hall (1977)

Repulsion (1965)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Knife In The Water (1962)

The Tenant (1976)

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Persona (1966)

The Magician (1958)

Hour Of The Wolf (1968)

The Virgin Spring (1960)

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Shining (1980)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Regarding Henry (1991)

Angela (1995)

Badlands (1973)

Casino (1995)

On The Waterfront (1954)

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Jules and Jim (1962)

The Bitter Tears Of Petra von Kant (1972)

Wings Of Desire (1987)

The Killer Inside Me (1976)

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Married To The Mob (1988)

Blue Velvet (1986)

Dune (1984)

Imitation Of Life (1934)

Imitation Of Life (1959)

Written On The Wind (1956)

Magnificent Obsession (1954)

All That Heaven Allows...

Wim Wenders’ adaptation of Peter Handke’s The Goalie's Anxiety At The Penalty Kick in the New Directors/New Films at 50: A Retrospective Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s 50th New Directors/New Films to include a retrospective with free virtual screenings of Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna; Sara Driver’s Sleepwalk; Christopher Nolan’s Following; Eduardo Coutinho’s Twenty Years Later; Horace Ové’s Playing Away; Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding; Gregg Araki’s The Living End; Humberto Solás’s Lucía; Mani Kaul’s Duvidha; Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy, and Wim Wenders’ adaptation of Peter Handke’s The Goalie's Anxiety At The Penalty Kick.

Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s 50th New Directors/New Films

Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta (Spain) will open the festival and Theo Anthony’s All Light,...

Lyon, France — Germany’s film heritage sector is celebrating a new federal and state-funded initiative launching in January that will provide €10 million ($11.15 million) a year towards the digitization and preservation of feature films.

Rainer Rother, the artistic director of the Deutsche Kinemathek, outlined the plan at a panel discussion at the Lumière Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France, as part of this year’s focus on Germany and the country’s heritage sector.

Rother, who also serves as head of the Berlin Film Festival’s Retrospective sidebar, said the initiative, which is overseen by the German Federal Film Board (Ffa), would initially run for 10 years and was based on three criteria: Exploitation interest from rights holders, such as producers or distributors; curatorial interest from film heritage institutions or film festivals; and preservation necessity in the case of damaged film material.

The new digitization support is limited to €40,000 per film.

Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize Friday for his efforts to end his country’s two-decade war with neighboring Eritrea.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Abiy’s “efforts deserve recognition and need encouragement.”

Abiy has also won praise for helping to broker a power-sharing deal in neighboring Sudan following the arrest of that country’s longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir.

Also Read: 'Wings of Desire' Writer Peter Handke and Polish Author Olga Tokarczuk Win Nobel Prize in Literature

Abiy’s win follows 2018’s Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad and 2017’s Internationals Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded Austrian author and “Wings of Desire” screenwriter Peter Handke and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Read original story Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Wins Nobel Peace Prize At TheWrap...

Austrian playwright and author Peter Handke, perhaps best-known in film circles for his screenplay of Wim Wenders’ classic Wings Of Desire, has won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. Playwright, novelist, screenwriter and director Handke also wrote Wenders’ movie The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick and directed movies including The Left-Handed Woman and The Absence, both of which starred Bruno Ganz. The decision to award Handke won’t be without controversy given his support for the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war, and for speaking at the 2006 funeral of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, who was accused of genocide and other war crimes. Meanwhile, Polish novelist and activist Olga Tokarczuk belatedly won the 2018 award, which was delayed by a year after a crisis in the academy sparked by allegations against Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of Nobel Academy member Katarina Frostenson. Agnieszka Holland adapted one of Tokarczuk’s most celebrated novels into the 2017 movie Spoor.

Austrian writer Peter Handke, who helped pen the screenplay for Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire,” and Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, one of whose novels was adapted into the Berlinale film “Spoor,” have been named winners of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Handke was awarded the prize for 2019, and Tokarczuk was retroactively named as the winner for 2018. The Nobel for literature was not given out last year because of a sexual assault scandal that engulfed the prize committee.

The announcement of the award winners Thursday came after the body that gives out the literature prize, the Swedish Academy, pledged to be more proactive in considering writers from other parts of the world amid longtime accusations of European and Anglophone bias. Both Tokarczuk and Handke, however, are Europeans.

Tokarczuk, 57, was considered a strong contender for the prize. Her novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” was widely acclaimed, recently...

Wim Wenders's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) is showing January 7 – February 5, 2019 on Mubi in the United Kingdom as part of the series First Films First and Wim Wenders: Journeys of No Return.I“For a moment the film was a smell, a taste in the mouth, a tingle in the hands, a draught felt through a wet shirt, a children’s book that you haven’t seen since you were five years old, a blink of the eye.

It’s like walking out of the subway into broad daylight.”—Wim Wenders, Van Morrison 1970 IIIn the May 1970 edition of the magazine Filmkritik, Wim Wenders wrote in a review titled "Emotion Pictures slowly rockin’ on" of a Grateful Dead album: "Slow and calm and melancholy movements and images." That same year he shot with Robby Müller his first feature Summer in the City—his graduation film—about a young man named Franz,...

A murderous footballer’s journey is the focus of this majestic meditation on madness, misogyny and the American dream

Wim Wenders’s debut movie from 1972, now on rerelease, is a fantastically strange, lugubrious existential crime noir based on the novel by Peter Handke (with whom Wenders co-wrote the screenplay). It is now sadly stuck with the clumsiest and most tin-eared translated title imaginable, terrible compared with The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, which was what Handke’s book was generally called for English-speaking audiences. It is a bit of an ironic time for this film to reappear here, of course. The English no longer have any fear of penalties.

The scene is a football match in Vienna, where the goalkeeper for the visiting side is shown impassively standing in the goalmouth watching the action at the other end. He has the faintly Kafkaesque name of Joseph Bloch (played by...

“Inside the theater he breathed freely.” –Peter Handke, The Anxiety of the Goalie at the Penalty KickARRIVALBefore I attended the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen for the first time in early May, the place-name had already been linked to a handful of geographical-cultural associations in my mind: the site of the legendary declaration of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto by a new generation of German filmmakers that announced the official break from Germany’s post-war cinema (‘The old is dead. We believe in the new’ was their dictum); the place where Wim Wenders grew up and shot a portion of his film Alice in the Cities (remember Alice and Philip Winter driving around town and its environs searching for her grandmother?); the city where Peter Handke premiered his earliest play ‘Self-Accusation’ in 1966; and, most importantly, its centrality in the Ruhr Region—the industrial rust belt of Germany. Some of these things were...

In an eclectic career spanning half a century, Wim Wenders continues to channel the zeitgeist: his romantic thriller “Submergence” recently opened in the U.S. and his documentary “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word” is set to premiere at Cannes.

Wenders helped define New German Cinema with his road-movie trilogy starting in 1974, “Alice in the Cities,” “Wrong Move” and “Kings of the Road”). Over the years, he has also brought to the big screen timely social commentary, a unique perspective on the American experience, and exuberant celebrations of music and dance in “Buena Vista Social Club,” “The Soul of a Man” and “Pina.” The filmmaker is also busy restoring past films, including 1987 classic “Wings of Desire.”

Variety first mentioned Wenders in an Aug. 26, 1970 report about financing for his upcoming project “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick” (based on a novel and referred to as “Goal Keeper Frightened...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (1987) is showing from February 16 - March 18, 2018 in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and France.Forty minutes into Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, Cassiel (Otto Sander) sits next to an old man dubbed Homer (Curt Bois) and watches him flick through a photo book inside Berlin’s City Library. Homer, however, can’t see him: Cassiel does not belong to this world, but to the community of somber-looking, coat-wearing angels hovering above Berlin. The old man’s eyes glued to the book, the camera suddenly shifts to World War II newsreel footage of the war-torn capital, and Homer’s voiceover accompanies the photos of dead infants and corpses piled along the sidewalks: “No one has so far succeeded in singing an epic of peace… what is it about peace that makes its story so hard to tell?...

Reda Kateb met Ben Mendelsohn on the set of Ryan Gosling's sharp Lost River Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Wim Wenders has played a big part for Reda Kateb with films Paris, Texas, The State Of Things, Buena Vista Social Club, and The Soul Of A Man and he recently starred with Sophie Semin in Les Beaux Jours D'Aranjuez, based on a Peter Handke story and appears in Wim's latest, Submergence, starring James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander. Longtime Nick Cave collaborator Warren Ellis, who is featured in Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth's 20,000 Days On Earth and is the composer for Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang, got involved with Étienne Comar's Django through Reda's film Pitchoune.

Cave and Ellis did work for David Oelhoffen's intimate Loin Des Hommes, in which Reda starred opposite Viggo Mortensen. His next film, Territoires, will be with Alice Winocour's Disorder star Matthias Schoenaerts,...

Wim Wenders’ “The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez” has received mostly negative reviews on this year’s fall festival circuit. IndieWire’s own Ben Croll gave the film a D grade and said that it’s “ploddingly, achingly dull,” and other reviews have described it as “inert and exasperatingly supercilious,” “prettily sunlit but otherwise insufferable,” and “a literal representation of how creatively bankrupt Wim Wenders has become.” An adaptation of Peter Handke’s two-hander play by the same name, the film features a conversation between a man (Reda Kateb) and a woman (Sophie Semin) as they discuss their childhoods, memories, sexual experiences, and more. Watch a trailer and clips from the film below.

Read More: The Essentials: The 10 Best Wim Wenders Films

Wenders has made plenty of acclaimed films over the course of his four-decade long career. His Road Movie trilogy – “Alice in the Cities,” “The Wrong Move,” “Kings of the Road...

As he jumps between narrative and documentary over the last decade, Wim Wenders‘ contributions to the latter genre have proved more fruitful, with his gorgeous 3D work Pina and the haunting documentary The Salt of the Earth. He came to Venice and Tiff this year with a new film in the former category, The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, which follows a man and woman’s conversation about love, freedom, and beauty — shot in 3D, of course.

We now have the first trailer and batch of clips, something we recommend watching alongside our informative interview with the director from Venice. As for the film, we said in our review, “The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, the latest wistful, contemplative narrative effort from German director Wim Wenders, is the type of “European Film” you might have expected Homer to stumble upon in an arthouse cinema in an earlier season of The Simpsons.”

Starring Reda Kateb,...

Wim Wenders‘ latest film, an adaptation of Peter Handke’s The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week. While the legendary New German Cinema director has, in recent years, found much more success with his non-fiction output, Aranjuez is undeniably wistful stuff — and frankly quite dated, too, yet it nevertheless demonstrates that Wenders is still eager to take risks with his films and further push the boundaries of his technique. Whatever the case, in a quaint hotel by the Mediterranean Sea, we found the great man in a somewhat introspective mood.

Shot, essentially, as a 3D chamber piece, Aranjuez imagines the conversation between a man and a woman sitting on the patio of a grand old French chateau. The man talks nostalgia. The woman talks sex. Nick Cave appears on a piano. Check out our conversation below.

The Film Stage: Aranjuez takes place on a...

Look, there’s no point beating around the bush: Wim Wenders’ 3D snoozefest “The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez” is not a good movie. It’s not a good movie, and at the same time, it doesn’t fail so spectacularly so to provide a compelling secondary reading. It’s neither good nor so bad it’s good; it is just ploddingly, achingly dull. And yet, qualifiers be damned, I think the film might stand the test of time. I think it could live on as a curiosity, as an answer to the question, “What is the most uniquely spoiler-impervious film since Andy Warhol aimed his camera at the Empire State Building and let it roll for eight hours?”

Just what makes it so impervious to spoilers, you ask? That’s easy – nothing happens. Like, nothing at all. Which is entirely the point of the film, an adaptation of a theatrical...

A supercilious, self-conscious two-hander about life and love is saved from insufferable dullness by some Nick Cave songs and one joke

Wim Wenders’ The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez is an inert and exasperatingly supercilious two-hander: self-conscious, tedious, with a dated and cumbersome theatricality, tricked out in a 3D presentation that adds nothing to its dull stereoscopic tableaux of an idealised French garden outside Paris. However, it does come briefly to life with its cameo: Nick Cave appears at the piano, singing affectingly of love and loss.

The movie is based on a theatre piece by Wenders’ veteran collaborator Peter Handke (the co-writer of Wings of Desire), and Handke himself has a fleeting walk-on as a gardener.

Continue reading...

The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, the latest wistful, contemplative narrative effort from German director Wim Wenders, is the type of “European Film” you might have expected Homer to stumble upon in an arthouse cinema in an earlier season of The Simpsons. Based on Peter Handke’s celebrated play, the film focuses solely on a German writer, at his desk, as he types out an imagined erotic conversation between a man and a women (both French and unnamed) sitting in the sunny terrace of his front garden.

Shot in 3D on a grand-looking estate, presumably on the outskirts of Paris, we follow the stream of consciousness of a woman (Sophie Semin) recalling her romantic exploits as a man (Reda Kateb) lightly goads her on. As she slowly reveals more and more of her previous conquests (or “silhouettes,” as she calls them), the man begins to tell his own tales of a time spent in Aranjuez.

Energy company Aet has been one of the festival’s four primary sponsors for 15 years.

The decision by the local energy concern Azienda Elettrica Ticinese (Aet) to pull the plug on its sponsorship after this year’s edition of the Locarno Film Festival (Aug 3-13) is “a disaster”, according to festival president Marco Solari.

A report by local news outlet Ticinonews suggested that, although the sponsors’ contributions are not made public, “a rapid calculation” would translate into a “weighty particpation” in the six digit range.

In a statement, Aet’s CEO Roberto Pronini explained that “the deep structural changes affecting Europe’s electric energy market and the ensuing difficulties based in Switzerland” had forced Aet into “a drastic downsizing“ of its sponsorship policy.

Aet had been one of Locarno’s four main sponsors for 15 consecutive editions since 2002.

The energy concern is also pulling out of sponsoring hockey clubs in Lugano and Ambri-Piotta and the annual JazzAscona festival...

A major talent of the New German Cinema finds his footing out on the open highway, in a trio of intensely creative pictures that capture the pace and feel of living off the beaten path. All three star Rüdiger Vogler, an actor who could be director Wim Wenders' alter ego. Wim Wenders' The Road Trilogy Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 813 1974-1976 / B&W and Color / 1:66 widescreen / 113, 104, 176 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 30, 2016 / 99.95 Starring Rüdiger Vogler, Lisa Kreuzer, Yetta Rottländer; Hannah Schygulla, Nasstasja Kinski, Hans Christian Blech, Ivan Desny; Robert Zischler. Cinematography Robby Müller, Martin Schäfer Film Editor Peter Przygodda, Barbara von Weltershausen Original Music Can, Jürgen Knieper, Axel Linstädt. Directed by Wim Wenders

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

This morning I 'fessed up to never having seen David Lynch's Lost Highway. Now I get to say that until now I've never seen Wim Wenders'...

Screen rounds up the films from across the globe that could launch at Cannes…

With less than a month to go until the Cannes Film Festival announces its line-up at its annual Paris press conference on April 14, Screen looks at what could make it into Official Selection and the parallel sections of Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week.

UK and Ireland

The UK could have one of its strongest Cannes for years with hot favourites for a competition slot including Andrea Arnold’s Shia Labeouf-starring Us road movie American Honey and Ken Loach’s gritty Northern England-set drama I, Daniel Blake. It would be Loach’s 12th time in competition.

Ben Wheatley is also reportedly gunning for an Official Selection slot for his 1970s Boston-set, gangland thriller Free Fire, potentially Out of Competition or in Midnight Screenings. He was last in Cannes with Sightseers in Directors’ Fortnight.

Other UK hopefuls include Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins and Indian...

Sales outfit to introduce buyers to Submergence at the Efm.

X-Men star James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander, the Oscar-nominated star of The Danish Girl, have been confirmed to topline love story Submergence from director Wim Wenders (Wings Of Desire).

The film, which is due to shoot this March throughout Spain, Germany and France, is set to be among the hottest packages at the upcoming European Film Market (Efm) in Berlin next month.

London-based Embankment has boarded sales on the script about two lovers, facing life-or-death situations and separated by thousands of miles.

Englishman and accused spy James More (McAvoy) is held captive by jihadist fighters in Somalia while, on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders (Vikander) is exploring the greatest depths of the ocean floor from her submersible.

In their confines, they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, where a chance encounter on a beach in France led to an intense and enduring romance...

The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez

Director: Wim Wenders

Writers: Peter Handke, Wim Wenders

Although we weren’t very enthusiastic about Wenders’ 2015 3D Canadian set narrative Everything Will Be Fine, which premiered at Berlin, the auteur has lined up his next two features already. We’re intrigued about his adaptation of Peter Handke’s play The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez. Wenders has a long collaborative history with Handke (he produced 1978’s The Left Handed Woman, which was Handke’s directorial debut, premiering at Cannes). Handke’s play consists of a dialogue between a man and woman one summer night as they share their feelings on all sorts of subjects. The play has been described as ‘investigating how and what we talk about when we talk about love.” We’re excited to see Alfama Films producing, a production company which usually backs exciting cinema from some of the world’s best auteurs.

Happy 77th birthday to one of our favorite actors, Christopher Lloyd!

The actor, who's played some of filmdom's most beloved characters, including Doc Brown in "Back to the Future," Professor Plum in "Clue," and Uncle Fester in the "Addams Family" films, was born on October 22, 1938 in Stamford, Conn.

Partly because of his height, and partly because of his manic intensity and commitment to even the wildest characters, he's portrayed a series of eccentrics, from mad scientists to aliens; had an impressive, award-winning theater career; and will always be remembered as Reverend Jim on "Taxi."

In honor of his 77th birthday, we've come up with 75 reasons why he's so awesome.

1. He's played a Klingon, a cartoon, the Wizard of Oz, an angel, a leper, and a geriatric vampire.

2. He stands an impressive 6'1."

3. Because he's so tall, he had to hunch over to appear in the same frame with "Back to the Future...

Iranian director Shirin Neshat to also receive support from German fund.

Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Mbb) has allocated $3.7m (€3.3m) production support to 20 new projects ranging from Gore Verbinski’s horror film A Cure For Wellness to Iranian-born video artist Shirin Neshat’s Looking For Oum Kulthum.

Verbinski’s film, which was shooting at locations in Baden-Württemberg and at the Babelsberg Studios in the summer, received the highest single amount - $560,000 (€500,000) – at this funding session.

Neshat’s homage to the legendary Egyptian singer and musician Kulthum – a co-production between Berlin-based Razor Filmproduktion, Austria’s Coop 99, France’s Arsam International and Egypt’s Film Clinic Cairo - received $168,439 (€150,000) production backing.

Other projects supported by Mbb include:

Wim Wenders’ The Beautiful Days Of Aranjuez, which marks his fifth collaboration with the Austrian dramatist Peter Handke and is now his second fiction feature film to be made in 3D after Every Thing Will be Fine.

Roger Spottiswoode’s TV movie...

Wim Wenders with Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Claire Brunel

The director of recent documentaries Pina on the late great choreographer poet Pina Bausch and the Oscar nominated The Salt Of The Earth with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado on master photographer Sebastião Salgado, is in New York for Wim Wenders: Portraits Along The Road, the first stop for a major retrospective of his films. Wenders has many long-term collaborations along the way including Peter Handke and Nick Cave who will appear with Reda Kateb (great in David Oelhoffen's Albert Camus adaptation, Far From Men, opposite Viggo Mortensen) and Sophie Semin in his latest film, The Beautiful Days Of Aranjuez (Les Beaux Jours D’Aranjuez).

We also talked about how in Nanni Moretti's Mia Madre the poster of Wings Of Desire made it into a dream sequence and Wim's Film4Climate involvement.

In the elevator on my way to meet Wim,...

Wim Wenders' new film to star Sophie Semin and Reda Kateb Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Salt Of The Earth and Pina director, Wim Wenders, has begun filming his first French-language film an hour northwest of Paris in the Vexin area. It is based on a Peter Handke text he calls "a summer dialogue" and the title of the film will be Les Beaux Jours d’Aranjuez (The Beautiful Days Of Aranjuez), which is the first line of Friedrich Schiller's play Don Carlos. Wim's description follows: "It’s a woman and a man talking to each other, for an indefinite amount of time (the whole summer?) about love, sex, time, nature, memory…"

The man is portrayed by Reda Kateb, who starred opposite Viggo Mortensen in David Oelhoffen's elegiac Loin Des Hommes (Far From Men) based on the Albert Camus short story L'Hôte, and the woman is Sophie Semin.

While the reception of his 3D Drama "Every Thing Will Be Fine" was fairly tepid at the Berlin International Film Festival, the ever-busy Wim Wenders is already gearing up for a new film project. This summer he'll start shooting "Les Beaux Jours d’Aranjuez," starring Reda Kateb and Sophie Semin, based on the play by Peter Handke who is expected to make a cameo. No word on plot details yet, mostly because my French isn't up to scratch, and Google Translate makes things a further mess. [Screen Daily] " '71" director Yann Demange is going Hollywood. Sony has snapped up the buzz-making filmmaker for "The Seven Five." Based on the documentary of the same name, the story "focuses on Michael Dowd, who was arrested in 1992 for leading a ring of dirty cops for the best part of eight years between 1986-1992. Their crimes included theft, abuse and drug dealing. Dowd’s case exposed...

Hot projects new to Screenbase include Nicolas Winding Refn feature The Neon Demon, Pope Francis biopic Francisco, Brady Corbet’s directorial debut The Childhood Of A Leader and a new adaptation by Wim Wenders.Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon

Elle Fanning, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, Abbey Lee, Bella Heathcote and Jena Malone have signed on to co-star in Nicolas Winding Refn’s next feature.

“After making Drive and falling madly in love with the electricity of Los Angeles, I knew I had to return to tell the story of The Neon Demon,” Winding Refn said.

Principal photography will begin in Los Angeles on March 30. Gaumont and Wild Bunch are co-selling the title.

Wim Wenders’ Les Beaux Jours D’Aranjuez

This adaptation of the play by Peter Handke was announced by Alfama’s Paulo Branco during the Efm. It will star Reda Kateb and Sophie Semin. Wenders is expected to shoot in June.

Brady Corbet’s [link...

Above: German poster for The American Friend (Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1977).

Running concurrently with the Berlin International Film Festival, at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, there is a beautiful exhibition of some fifty posters by husband and wife graphic artists Margrit and Peter Sickert, who sign their posters simply “Sickerts.” In a year in which the festival seems to have been less than rosy for the old guard of the New German Cinema, it is nice to see some of the posters from the movement’s heyday on display.

The Sickerts, who attended the opening of the exhibition, created over 300 posters from the 1960s to the 1990s in a wide variety of styles ranging from hyperrealist illustration to monochrome photographic minimalism. Their painting of Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz for Wim Wenders’ The American Friend—which for years I thought was by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert who did many of...

A quick overview of some of the more interesting projects that have been announced during the Berlinale: "Raoul Peck is on board to direct The Young Karl Marx, a period drama chronicling the turbulent youth and friendship between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels," reports Elsa Keslassy for Variety. August Diehl and Alexander Fehling are slated to star. Martin Scorsese will executive produce Ben Wheatley's Free Fire. This June, Wim Wenders will shoot Les beaux jours d’Aranjuez, an adaptation of the play by Peter Handke. Werner Herzog will begin work on his super-volcano movie with Veronica Ferres, Salt and Fire, in April. André Téchiné, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Swanberg and David Lowery also have projects in the works. » - David Hudson...

A quick overview of some of the more interesting projects that have been announced during the Berlinale: "Raoul Peck is on board to direct The Young Karl Marx, a period drama chronicling the turbulent youth and friendship between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels," reports Elsa Keslassy for Variety. August Diehl and Alexander Fehling are slated to star. Martin Scorsese will executive produce Ben Wheatley's Free Fire. This June, Wim Wenders will shoot Les beaux jours d’Aranjuez, an adaptation of the play by Peter Handke. Werner Herzog will begin work on his super-volcano movie with Veronica Ferres, Salt and Fire, in April. André Téchiné, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Swanberg and David Lowery also have projects in the works. » - David Hudson...

Exclusive: Les beaux jours d’Aranjuez is an adaptation of the play by Peter Handke.

German auteur Wim Wenders is to shoot new movie Les beaux jours d’Aranjuez in June.

The project was announced by Alfama’s Paulo Branco during the Efm. The film is an adaptation of the play by Peter Handke. It will star Reda Kateb and Sophie Semin. Handke himself is likely to have a cameo. The film will be an Alfama/Road Movies coproduction, to be sold by Alfama.

The film marks a reunion between Wenders and veteran Portuguese producer Branco, who co-produced Wenders’ The State Of Things in 1982 and has worked with him several times since.

Wenders’ Every Thing Will Be Fine is screening out of competition, sold by Hanway.

Branco has also announced various other new projects. This year, Benoit Jacquot should finally be shooting Alfama’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2001 novella, The Body Artist...

Happy 75th birthday to one of our favorite actors, Christopher Lloyd!

The actor, who's played some of filmdom's most beloved characters, including Doc Brown in "Back to the Future," Professor Plum in "Clue," and Uncle Fester in the "Addams Family" films, was born on October 22, 1938 in Stamford, Conn.

Partly because of his height, and partly because of his manic intensity and commitment to even the wildest characters, he's portrayed a series of eccentrics, from mad scientists to aliens; had an impressive, award-winning theater career; and will always be remembered as Reverend Jim on "Taxi."

In honor of his 75th birthday, we've come up with 75 reasons why he's so awesome.

1. He's played a Klingon, a cartoon, the Wizard of Oz, an angel, a leper, and a geriatric vampire.

2. He stands an impressive 6'1."

3. Because he's so tall, he had to hunch over to appear in the same frame with "Back to the Future...

“When history is what it should be, it is an elaboration of cinema.” —Ortega y Gasset

“The key for me is finding some rhythm of the film, not so much in the plot from a traditional sense but, rather, from its internal rhythm.” —Matías Piñeiro

1

There are works of art that affect in bulk, all at once; these are the aesthetic experiences that unify, that impose boundaries on the license of eye and ear. Other works of art achieve a dissociated and dissociating stylistic program; these are the works that cannot be experienced or understood as feats of synthesis, or as products of a single point of view.

While much of the art of the past century might be described as an effort toward a radical disaffiliation of elements—word and image, depth and surface, form and content—awareness of a quarrelsome relationship between two presumably incompatible ways of making...

Peter Przygodda, the renowned editor who worked with Wim Wenders, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans W Geissendörfer, Reinhard Hauff, Klaus Lemke, Peter Handke and Romuald Karmakar, has died at the age of 70. He was, as Ekkehard Knörer writes in die taz, the most important editor — a term he preferred over another commonly used in Germany, "Cutter" — of the New German Cinema of the 70s and early 80s.

Though he'd originally intended to become an architect, Przygodda founded a small theater with Rolf Zacher and shot his first short film in 1969, Der Besuch auf dem Lande (The Visit to the Country), with Zacher taking on the lead role. Later that same year, he began working with Wenders on Summer in the City, striking up a friendship and professional partnership that would see them all the way through Palermo Shooting in 2008. Przygodda won the German Film Prize (Gold) for his work on...

German movie mogul known for Downfall and The Baader Meinhof Complex

In 1977, Wim Wenders proclaimed: "Never before and in no other country have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here [in Germany]. Nowhere else have people suffered such a loss of confidence in images of their own, their own stories and myths as we have." The film producer Bernd Eichinger, who has died of a heart attack aged 61, went further than most to bring back that confidence to German cinema.

Still suffering from the fatal legacy of nazism, German cinema emerged from the doldrums of the 50s and 60s into the next decade with directors such as Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. Eichinger dreamed of re-establishing the glory days of German cinema of the 1920s, when the world-renowned film company Ufa was both a commercial and artistic success. He believed that art without financial success, which attracted small audiences,...

I loved Jeff Mizushima’s delicate, entirely charming, and vaguely emo-ish Etienne! when I saw it last year after its CineVegas premiere. I wound up putting Jeff in our “25 New Faces” simply because the film’s sensibility seemed so different to me. I also loved its formally-bold second-half narrative shift and director Caveh Zahedi’s last-reel appearance in a scene that could have been taken from a Peter Handke novel. The film receives its East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn gastropub theater reRun beginning tomorrow for a one-week run. You can reserve tickets here. Here’s what I wrote last year: Writer-director Jeff Mizushima won the Filmmaker To Watch Award at CineVegas this year for Etienne!, an...

I think it’s safe to assume that we all love what Criterion is putting out these days, especially those deemed worthy to receive a high definition release on Blu-ray. It’s a given that we also love spreading the good word of Criterion, being that we went so far as to start a podcast and website, to keep the discussion of quality home video releases alive and well.

We also love using our Disc 2 episodes to feature other DVD’s and Blu-ray’s that we find exceptional, and over the past year there have certainly been a lot to talk about.

The fine folks over at Home Media Magazine have unveiled their annual HD Awards, and they want you to weigh in on the best Blu-ray releases from the past year. While I’m sure we’d all like to see that list completely full of discs from the Criterion Collection,...

Wings Of Desire is a lot like Where The Wild Things Are. Ok, I know that sounds extremely far-fetched, but stick with me here. I know one film involves invisible angels watching humans, their struggles and suffering and the other involves large hirsute monsters with big heads and even bigger tempers making friends with a runaway boy with anger issues, but there are two major common denominators to both films: 1) They’re rooted and invested in human emotions, and 2) Neither adheres to the standard three-act narrative format, forgoing customary cinematic structure and instead drifting and meandering along an (apparently) uncharted course.

I’ve seen Wings Of Desire and Where The Wild Things twice. And in both cases I enjoyed and appreciated the film more after the second viewing, probably because I wasn’t encumbered by expectations of a traditionally told story. Do I think both movies are perfect? No. They...

Chicago – When true film fans receive the monthly Criterion newsletter, they usually skim it looking for their favorite films. It’s not that Criterion really ever makes bad decisions, but when a personal favorite gets the call, it’s like watching the baseball player you grew up idolizing get inducted into the Hall of Fane. Such is the feeling I get when I look at the Criterion Blu-Ray release of “Wings of Desire,” one of the most lyrically beautiful films ever made.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0

Wim Wenders’ 1987 masterpiece is the filmmaker’s ode to his favorite city, Berlin, using faith and love as its instruments. Some readers may know the story better from the Nicolas Cage remake “City of Angels,” but that film is merely a shadow of one of the most acclaimed works of the last three decades. Bruno Ganz plays Damiel, an angel who wanders the streets of Berlin...

Wings of Desire is one of those films that I’ve always wanted to see, but been weary of getting around to watching. Sure, it’s a well-respected classic of its time, often cited as one of the great films of the 1980’s, and held the cache of “the foreign film people who don’t watch foreign films love” much like films like Amelie or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But when the film came out Pauline Kael decimated it in her review. And I hate being the movie guy who doesn’t like films that everyone else likes, which is often the case. My review after the jump.

Kael was wrong; it’s a touching fable about two angels hovering over Germany. They are Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Dumont), and they listen in on a number of different people as they observe humanity from a ablack and white distance.