The Assassination of Jesse James

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Francis Ford Coppola has relaunched Zoetrope.com as a virtual studio for the writing community and a showcase for short films.

Cinephilia and Beyond have posted an appreciation of The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, including the full script and more:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a contemplative, slow-paced, superbly acted piece of contemporary filmmaking which has to be considered an important player in the 21st century revival of the Western genre, an artistically accomplished, technically brilliant exploration of one of the founding myths of American identity, and a movie whose stature is bound to rise in the decades to come.

Watch a video imagining if other films were edited like Requiem for a Dream:

Mogwai has listed their 10 favorite Criterion films:

Deciding which Akira Kurosawa film to choose for this list was extremely difficult, as he made so many tremendous films. Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo are all amazing, but I love this version of Macbeth. During the final scene, Kurosawa had trained archers fire real arrows at Toshiro Mifune. Brilliant. —MB

Watch a trailer for a French retrospective of Hou Hsiao-Hsien‘s films, newly restored:

Criterion‘s Kier-La Janiesse on their recently released Carnival of Souls:

In the sixteenth century, the medieval notion of purgatory as a physical place started losing favor to a broader conceptualization of it as a liminal state of being. As the centuries wore on and Dante’s seven-terraced description of purgatory in The Divine Comedy was increasingly accepted as allegorical, even within the church itself, the concept called attention to other relationships that were appearing in newly emerging secular philosophy and psychology—such as those between the sleeper and the dream world, the existentialist and the Absurd. Those ideologies challenged the objective physical definition of “place” itself, posing the question of how much of our experience unfolds solely within the confines of our own imaginations.

Watch a talk with Kate Beckinsale for Love & Friendship:

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