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.
SXSW has unveiled its Midnight and shorts line-up with the amazing The World of Tomorrow, The Nightmare (review), and more.
Watch Wes Anderson and the cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel discuss the classic films they were influenced by, many of which we discussed here:
There’s a a four-hour cut of Cloud Atlas, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos tells Deadline when discussing the Wachowskis‘ forthcoming show Sense8:
“It’s the best four hours of anything we’ve done. Their film reviews have been brutal, and everything after The Matrix didn’t go well, but if you look at the earlier cuts of their films before they had to jam them down to 120 minutes, it’s amazing. There’s a four-hour cut of Cloud Atlas that will blow you away.”
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints director David Lowery is blogging daily from the set of his Pete’s Dragon reboot.
Watch Film Comment’s video essay on Robert Altman‘s evolution from television to film:
At Flavorwire, Jason Bailey argues — shockingly — that you should see a film before you critique it:
The Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself includes a clip, taken from a TV appearance in 1980, in which the Pulitzer Prize winner explains the station of the movie critic. “I sit at the desk next to our music critic at the Sun-Times,” he explains. “People are very worshipful of him — ‘Oh, what did you think of Schulte’s conducting last night?’ And then he will say, and they will nod like this and go away. Then they’ll turn around and come up to me and say, ‘I totally disagree with your review in this morning’s paper!’” In the clip, he’s discussing our inflexibility on our film opinions, but he’s also commenting on the degree to which film reviews are seen as second-class criticism. And that view has never been clearer than in the newest, weirdest trend in online film commentary: people writing about movies they haven’t bothered to see.