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NOTES: Wes Anderson decided to have all 10 of listed films from France. Former romantic partners Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Love share three picks (“Napoleon,” “La Maison des Bois” and “The Leopard.”) Ari Aster lists the Coens’ underrated “A Serious Man” Bertrand Bonello clearly believes “Twin Peaks: The Return” is a movie (so do I). Peter Greenway has “Gladiator” on his list. Bong Joon-ho has “Mad Max: Fury Road” on his list....

The 76-year-old filmmaker does admit that there is genuine technical artistry behind MCU movies (one look at “Avengers: Endgame” and it’s hard to deny that), but that the essence of cinema, the mystery, discovery, and risk involved in making art, is missing from these movies. “Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament....

In other words, it’s the perfect example of why American cinema has been so sexless these last 10 or so years. There’s sexual politeness, and politicking, to the criteria IndieWire seems to be using here, so much so that many of the entries completely neglect actual on-screen eroticism in favor of topical resonance. What’s so erotic about “Moonlight”? “The Lighthouse”? “Midsommar”? Also, where is “Blue is the Warmest Color”? Can’t we separate the art from the artist and acknowledge that Abdelatif Kechiche directed one of the sexiest films ever made?...

“He’s one of the best actors I’ve worked with, and he’s the most committed to body and soul,” Ayer told /Film (via Newsweek). “He had a tooth pulled on Fury, and then on Tax Collector, he got his whole chest tattooed. So he kind of goes all in, and I’ve never known anyone that committed.” Seriously? All this for a David Ayer movie? ”The Tax Collector” has LaBeouf playing “Creeper,” a debt collector for local East L....

Kirsten Johnson not only finds a way to pay tribute to her dad, but gives us a much-needed therapeutic session on death in “Dick Johnson is Dead.” This delirious attempt from Johnson (director of the excellent 2018 doc “Cameraperson”) to make sense of the fact that someday her 86-year-old father’s life will come to an end, is a way for us all to come to terms with the inevitable. Using the magic of cinema to kill dad in staged scenes, the filmmaker even has him entering an open casket inside a church and pretending to be dead....

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The lineup for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival has been announced and it looks like an upgrade from this past January’s virtual edition. There are bigger directing names, that’s for sure. What I’m circling right now are new works from the likes of Nicole Holofcener (“You Hurt My Feelings”), Ira Sachs (“Passages”), Sebastian Silva (“Rotting in the Sun”), Brandon Cronenberg (“Infinity Pool”), William Oldroyd (“Eileen”) and Cory Finley (“Landscape of Invisible Hand”)....

Maybe Depp and Burton’s shared disdain for Disney will bring them together again to make a fresh new original film. That’s the hope. The Burton/Depp partnership has given us great movies over the years, including “Edward Scissorhands,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Sleepy Hollow,” and, their magnum opus, “Ed Wood.” It seems harder and harder for a director to find himself an acting muse in today’s moviemaking landscape. Gone are the legendary collaborations that used to fire up the cinematic senses....

Guaranteeing 193 million subscribers a new feature every week in 2021 isn’t the easiest thing to accomplish, especially with productions being postponed/delayed left and right all around the world, but the 71 movies announced on Tuesday by Netflix will do just that. We’ve rummaged through the 71 titles, some look like duds, others are majors question marks, but we found 210 movies, across various different genres, that we can’t help but get very excited for....

In the 1990s, a staggering 17 films crossed the 180 minute mark: “The Green Mile,” “Malcolm X,” “Heat,” “Schindler’s List,” “Titanic,” “Nixon,” “JFK,” “Shortcuts,” “Dances With Wolves,” “Braveheart,” “Casino,” “Magnolia,” “Wyatt Earp,” “Meet Joe Black” and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” The 2000s just had ten 3+ hour films, but that’s high and mighty when compared to this decade which, as mentioned previously, just has one. This significant decline shows a stagnant studio system in search of the simple buck instead of genuine creative expression....

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Sundance was a gift that kept on giving all year long with insightful new visions (“Sorry to Bother You,” “Eighth Grade,” “Leave No Trace,” “Hereditary,” “Mandy” and “Blindspotting“) and their usual impressive crop of documentaries (“Won’t You Be My Neighbour,” “Minding the Gap,” “Three Identical Strangers,” “Shirkers,” “Bisbee ’17”). And don’t get me started on Cannes, which, despite the complainers saying that it just isn’t what it used to be, managed to produce more than a handful of the best movies of the year....

“It has two really strong performances and a great script,” said TIFF head Cameron Bailey at yesterday’s announcement of the TIFF lineup. However, today we got a buzz-piece from IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, which all but seals our expectations for Baumbach’s movie. The “hype-train” has arrived indeed. The title of Kohn’s write-up: ‘Marriage Story’: Noah Baumbach On How His ‘Extremely Personal’ Movie Became His Most Ambitious.’ The 136 minutes long running time makes it ambitious in itself but even more fascinating is Baumbach deciding to name-check Ingmar Bergman but, more specifically, “Persona,” “Marriage Story” doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, but more with the craftsmanship....

This was the best decade for American film … ever. The artistic revolution had begun to take root in the mid-’60s. The studio system broke down at the end of that decade and paved the way for “New Hollywood” directors who were allowed the freedom to do their best work. The movies of this decade are so distinctive from what came before, and eventually after. Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Altman, Allen, Bogdanovich, Carpenter, Friedkin, Fosse, Hopper, Malick, Lynch, Ashby, Schrader, Cimino, De Palma and Ridley Scott all came of age during the decade, along with older directors making some of their best films, Lumet, Mel Brooks, Cassavetes, Kubrick, Peckinpah....

In his review, Lane states that “ideally, Cooper’s film would end after the first hour,” or “after the first night that Jackson Maine (Cooper) and Ally (Lady Gaga) spend together. They don’t have sex; they just hang out. She gets into a fight, and he buys frozen peas to soothe her swollen hand. He listens to her sing in a parking lot, then drops her off at home, where she lives with her father (Andrew Dice Clay)....

I am friends with Wells. We tend to share guest houses at whichever film fest we go to. He’s an all-around good guy, to me at least, but I do know that he’s irked his fair share of people over the last few years due to his all-too-honest approach to writing and I do know that he has accumulated a herd of haters in the process. His name was trending due to a column he wrote and then quickly deleted in which he provoked Twitterdom outrage by posting two separate messages he received from friends speculating about the implications of Tuesday’s shootings at Atlanta-area Asian spas and the Oscar prospects of the Chinese director of “Nomadland”, Chloe Zhao, and the American film about Korean immigrants, “Minari”....

— Where’s “First Cow”? Despite Venice boss saying Kelly Reichardt’s “First Cow” was going to Telluride and Toronto, it was still not announced in today’s, supposedly, last wave of titles.— GOING to Telluride and Toronto are Trey Edward Schultz’ “Waves,” Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life,” Tom Harper’s “The Aeronauts” Michael Covino’s “The Climb.” — NOT going to Telluride: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “The Truth,” “Lucy in the Sky,” “Seberg.” “WASP Network,” “Atlantic,” “Bacurau,” “Beanpole,” “Synonymes,” “About Endlessness....

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Lilly and Lana Wachowski hit rock bottom after their Netflix series “Sense 8” was cancelled despite having ended with a cliffhanger in expectation of a third season, then under negotiation. Netflix did eventually produced a two-and-a-half-hour series finale, released on June 8, 2018. However, it was “Jupiter Ascending” that did the Wachowskis in. I’m assuming the news of their offices closing is supposed to be seen as a silent retirement....

So, audiences loved “The Batman,” and so did many critics. A 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and 72 on Metacritic. I feel alone here. I thought it was a slog to get through. Not as imaginative as it thinks it is, nor as substantial. Reeves is a talented filmmaker, but this is just not a film that measures up to his talents. I gather plenty of readers have gotten a chance to watch it this weekend....