Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from our colleagues across the Internet — and, occasionally, our own writers. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Criterion’s August 2014 line-up has been unveiled, featuring All That Jazz, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and more.
At Deadspin, Tim Grierson on Sugar, the anti-Million Dollar Arm:
Hoop Dreams has haunted me ever since I saw it 20 years ago. The story of two black Chicago high school basketball players hoping to make the NBA and escape their inner-city lives, the film ends with their pro dreams very much in doubt. Decades later, I still remember the last thing William Gates, one of the two subjects, says as he begins to understand that stardom possibly isn’t in his future: “When somebody says, ‘When you get to the NBA, don’t forget about me,’ I should’ve said to them, ‘Well, If I don’t make it, don’t you forget about me.'”
Watch a video that connects the themes in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s last three films:
At Roger Ebert, Godfrey Cheshire on the career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
You’ve heard me call Rainer Werner Fassbinder the most important film director of the last half-century, and you’re not inclined to disagree or argue so much as you feel he’s still a bit beyond your ken. Like other dedicated, largely self-educated young cinephiles, you’ve done your due diligence on a host of great filmmakers, from Chaplin and Renoir to Godard, Mizoguchi and Kiarostami, learned enough about them and seen enough of their key works to form your own opinion. Fassbinder, though, remains a dark continent looming on the horizon, intriguing but largely “incognito,” as the old maps say.