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 40 greatest movie jump scares:
RogerEbert.com‘s Matt Zoller Seitz talks to Gena Rowlands about her career:
I get a lot of questions about John and how he started doing films. Independent films. A lot of the people asking these questions are young people who are interested in doing their own films. I like knowing that there are people out there who admire the work we did together, and still consider John an example of how this can be done. And he still is. He still is an example.
Listen to Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson discuss Heaven’s Gate and its revival at NYFF in 2012:
Alan Arkin picks his 10 favorite Criterion films:
Whenever I watch Seven Samurai I am immediately transported to sixteenth-century Japan. No analysis is possible, no appreciation of performance, direction, camera work, music. Somehow, I’m left feeling that miraculously, Kurosawa found a way to dig up a 400-year-old Japanese documentary. It’s a film completely devoid of artifice or ego. I have seen many of the actors in other films, but I always feel as if they’ve made some mistake, that their true identity lies in Seven Samurai. Like few films I have ever seen, this one somehow makes me feel ennobled. It’s visual Beethoven.
Steven Spielberg, Michael Shannon, Brie Larson, and more pick their favorite movie theaters:
Listen to The Cinephiliacs‘ appreciation of Abbas Kiarostami and read Keyframe‘s Vahid Mortazavi on the director’s evolution of the gesture of looking:
The Traveller, Abbas Kiarostami’s second feature-length film, released in 1974, follows Qassem, a poor schoolboy living in a small city in northwest Iran. Obsessed with football, Qassem is dying to attend an important football match in Tehran, over one hundred miles away, and he attempts to get the necessary money in a number of desperate ways. In the film’s most celebrated scene, Qassem swindles the younger kids at his school by selling them portraits he pretends to take with an old box camera. Though the camera is empty, he asks the kids to pose and snaps photo after photo—photos that will never materialize. This scene introduces a theme that will remain central to Kiarostami’s entire oeuvre: the relation of power inherent to the apparatus of looking. The dynamic between the person who looks and the person who is looked upon is predicated on vulnerability, deception and artifice, and Kiarostami has explored this conflict time and time again, shifting and probing the role of the filmmaker, character and audience.