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Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, 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.

At Fandor, Aaron Cutler looks back at Fritz Lang‘s career:

Film history frequently offers two versions of Fritz Lang: A maker of epic German tragedies and melodramas prior to Nazism’s rise, and a creator of lean, tight Hollywood noir films after leaving Germany in 1933. Yet this division placed within the great Austrian director’s half-century-long film career should be challenged. One reason why is that it overlooks the outliers, such as Lang’s lone film made in France, the splendidly gentle and sad supernatural romance Liliom (1934); his nineteenth-century adventure tale Moonfleet (1955), a CinemaScope work shot on the MGM backlot with an almost entirely British cast; and his final films, realized after he left Hollywood and returned to Germany. Another is that it ignores other major binaries and shifts in Lang’s practice.

Watch a 45-minute interview with Carlos Reygadas:

At The Dissolve, Scott Tobias on Robert De Niro and the origin of “The Face”:

seems funny in retrospect, but when We’re No Angels opened on December 15, 1989, when I was a senior in high school, I made a beeline from the closing bell to the first matinee at the nearest multiplex. Robert De Niro was my favorite actor. And here he was, making a comedy alongside Sean Penn, who was brilliant earlier that summer in Casualties Of War, and in Colors and At Close Range before that. (Oddly, I didn’t catch up with Fast Times At Ridgemont High until later in life, denying me one of Penn’s greatest performances and the formative experience known as Phoebe Cates.) David Mamet, hot off The Untouchables and House Of Games, wrote the script, and Neil Jordan, whom I knew only from the fine Mona Lisa—having skillfully sidestepped High Spirits the year before—was the director. This would be the movie event of the season, a capper to a watershed year that had already yielded Drugstore Cowboy, Do The Right Thing, and Sex, Lies, And Videotape. Cut to two hours later: Huh.

At New York Times, A.O. Scott on the death of adulthood in American culture:

Sometime this spring, during the first half of the final season of “Mad Men,” the popular pastime of watching the show — recapping episodes, tripping over spoilers, trading notes on the flawless production design, quibbling about historical details and debating big themes — segued into a parlor game of reading signs of its hero’s almost universally anticipated demise. Maybe the 5 o’clock shadow of mortality was on Don Draper (fig. 1) from the start. Maybe the plummeting graphics of the opening titles implied a literal as well as a moral fall. Maybe the notable deaths in previous seasons (fictional characters like Miss Blankenship, Lane Pryce and Bert Cooper, as well as figures like Marilyn Monroe and Medgar Evers) were premonitions of Don’s own departure. In any case, fans and critics settled in for a vigil. It was not a matter of whether, but of how and when.

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