Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
See the full list of winners of the 2016 Berlin Film Festival at Keyframe, and all of our reviews here.
Watch a short documentary on the career of legendary cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who has passed away at the age of 103:
RogerEbert.com‘s Matt Zoller Seitz on why Leonardo DiCaprio winning an Oscar for The Revenant would be bad for acting:
The acting-as-punishment routine takes this mentality to its lowest depth. Right now Leonardo DiCaprio is the front-runner in the Best Actor race for his performance in the survival epic “The Revenant,” in which he plays an 1830s trapper seeking revenge against a colleague who betrayed him and left him for dead in the wilderness. During the course of the film—which we’ve repeatedly been told was shot under very difficult weather conditions and in harsh terrain; filmmaker suffering is part of this narrative now, too—Leo wades and swims in icy water, crawls across hard tundra while dragging an injured leg behind him, eats raw bison liver, sucks the marrow out of the vertebrae of an animal skeleton, etc., in the name of survival, but also in the name of Art. “Just about every awards body has drunk the ‘Revenant’ Kool-Aid, buying into DiCaprio’s endless boasting about how super-hard the movie was to make,” wrote Matt Prigge, who agrees with me that Leo should not get an Oscar because it would reinforce poor messages.
The illustrious Skandies have named their favorite films of 2015, topped by Mad Max: Fury Road.
Watch a one-hour talk between The Big Short director Adam McKay and author Michael Lewis:
Little White Lies‘ Charles Barkham on how Martin Scorsese influenced Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket:
Comparatively speaking, Bottle Rocket and Mean Streets are the closest films between the two directors. The displays of immaturity are evidently similar. The scenes in Bottle Rocket of Dignan buying a gun and letting off fireworks seem to echo those in Mean Streets of Johnny Boy screaming and threatening thugs with broken pool cues and shooting his gun on a rooftop declaring, “Watch this, I’m gonna shoot the light out of the Empire State Building.”
Watch a 30-minute talk wth Mustang director Deniz Gamze Ergüven and her five stars:
LA Review of Books‘ Peter Labuza on the shallow depth of Son of Saul:
Instead, Saul becomes The Last Good Man because of his symbolically overloaded quest to find the rabbi to pray over the young boy. The director contrasts these actions with a group of resistant Jews planning an escape for just themselves. Saul’s selfless actions emerge as the only morally “good” acts in the film, turning the supposedly ambiguous film into a black-and-white choice. Nemes suggests that the only action that could make the Sonderkommando human would be regimented in a morality that simply had no place at Auschwitz. The psychology of the Sonderkommando thus ends up playing no role in exploring morality. Nemes puts us in physical proximity but never into the headspace.
Watch the trailer for Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2016: