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.
Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window will return to theaters in select cities on Sunday, March 22 and Wednesday, March 25.
Criterion have announced their June 2015 line-up (click titles for more info):
At The Talkhouse, Aaron Katz discusses Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja:
In my early twenties, I liked filmmakers who made aggressively troubling movies. Even more, I liked filmmakers who made aggressively quiet movies. Regardless of the means, the end that I was interested in was what I fancied to be an unflinching examination of the impossibility of the human condition. The fact that part of what made me like these movies was a pride in my ability to sit through and understand them was something I might have been dimly aware of, but which I didn’t allow myself to consider fully. I still care about some of movies that I liked when I was 20, but it is with increasing skepticism that I view films that seem purposefully to antagonize the audience. As I watch, I wonder if, and to what degree, the antagonism might be a goal unto itself. The sort of pile-it-on awfulness that befalls good people in Lars von Trier’s work from the late ’90s and early 2000s no longer holds much interest for me. It feels like a stunt, perhaps even a defense against criticism, building in the response that if you don’t like it, it’s probably because you can’t handle it. Aggressively quiet movies have held up better for me, but I still have nagging questions about the intent of long scenes where we watch someone doing something ostensibly mundane in real time. It’s not that I now believe this approach to filmmaking can’t be interesting and sincerely engaging, it’s just that I now don’t believe it’s inherently interesting and sincerely engaging.
Jia Zhangke will be awarded the Carosse d’Or prize during the Cannes festival, Variety reports.
Watch a trailer for John Schlesinger’s restored Far from the Madding Crowd, now in U.K. theaters:
Cut Print Film‘s Josh Oakley on It Follows and the suburban sprawl:
The suburbs are well-explored terrain for horror films. Halloween is the gold standard of exploiting the ennui of indistinguishable houses and unknowable neighbors for primal fears. The formula has been repeated numerous times over the years, but David Robert Mitchell still manages to dig out new, unnerving ground with his second feature. John Hughes by way of John Carpenter, It Follows is a brilliant and unique take on the existential terror of living as a teenager in suburbia.