Noah Baumbach

Those of you with an interest in the changing face of theatrical exhibition and film festival bylaws (there are dozens of us!) may have caught wind of some recent meshugas unfolding in France. This year’s main Competition slate at the Cannes Film Festival included two films from online-streaming giant Netflix, Bong Joon Ho’s creature feature Okja and Noah Baumbach’s singlehanded resurrection of Adam Sandler The Meyerowitz Stories. But there‘s been some consternation about opening the gates of Cannes to films that may never see release in France outside of the Internet. Is a movie that doesn’t play in a movie theater a movie at all?

Adam Sandler’s reign over Netflix is far from over. After the streaming service renewed his movie deal, Netflix bought Noah Baumbach’s upcoming The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), which is set to premiere at this month’s Cannes International Film Festival. Today, we got our first official look at the film, with four new images.

With two high-profile films premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Netflix is hard at work proving to filmmakers and financiers alike that it deserves to be taken seriously as both a commercial and artistic distribution platform. And while fans might be excited to watch Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja or Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories from the comfort of their own home, Netflix’s success may have run afoul of French law, putting its relationship with both the film festival and the entire French marketplace in a precarious position.

Good morning! Chances are that you’re just getting up and at ’em now, but a few time zones ahead in sunny France, the film industry has had a busy day. This morning saw the official announcement of the Cannes Film Festival’s class of 2017, with the full Competition and Un Certain Regard slates announced by head honcho Thierry Frémaux in a live press conference in the wee small hours of this morning. As ever, the Competition lineup (the most prestigious program in the world’s most prestigious film festival) boasts a deep roster of cinema’s most respected auteurs, ready to pull back the curtain on some tantalizing-sounding new projects. But let’s not talk around the real news here: Adam Sandler’s going to Cannes, baby.

Netflix, for all their diverting original series and Bong Joon-ho subsidization, has also been responsible for the introduction of a great evil into the world. I am referring, of course, to their seemingly infinite-picture development deal with chronic Phoner-of-It-In Adam Sandler. Netflix signed Sandler to a four-movie deal back in 2014, which has been going decidedly less-than-great so far — his Western spoof The Ridiculous Six was a big pile of donkey turds, and the trailer for his upcoming Sandy Wexler has not inspired much more confidence. When the news hit a few weeks ago that Netflix would re-up their deal with Sandler for four more movies, our coverage of the notice contained the words “oh no.”

In the generation of filmmaking greats that came up during the ’60s and ’70s, Brian De Palma can still stand comparison to such film school dropouts and Hollywood rebels as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg. His distinct brand of highly stylized, formally audacious thrillers have enraptured audiences again and again over a career that’s spanned genres and decades... Read

The film, which will reunite Baumbach with his While We’re Young star Ben Stiller as well as Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, and Grace Van Patten, centers on an “estranged New York family coming together in preparation of artist and patriarch Harold’s career retrospective.”

It’s a year of milestones for filmmaker Noah Baumbach. 2015 marks 20 years since his debut film, Kicking and Screaming, and a decade since his breakout indie as a writer and director, the autobiographical The Squid and The Whale. 2015 is also the first time in Baumbach’s career he’s released two features in one calendar year; his last effort, the outstanding While We’re Young, opened in theaters in April. Four months later, Baumbach returns with Mistress America, a bubbly screwball comedy about a lonely college freshman named Tracy (Lola Kirke) whose depressing social life gets a serious shot in the arm after she meets her vivacious new stepsister Brooke (Greta Gerwig).

The second trailer for Mistress America is just as wonderful as the first. The Frances Ha duo of star / writer Greta Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach return with what appears to be an equally charming and relatable follow-up about living in New York in your 20s. It looks as though their collaboration has paid off again, and we’re all happily reaping the reward.

From the very beginning of his career, Noah Baumbach has drawn comparisons to Woody Allen. Like Allen, Baumbach makes witty, urbane comedies of manners, mostly set in and around New York City. Many feature nebbishy Jewish actors (Jesse Eisenberg, Ben Stiller). Now we can add another Allen comparison to the mix: Baumbach’s become so prolific he’s releasing two movies in one calendar year. He’s an obsession with the New York Knicks, a thick pair of glasses, and a complete fear of technology away from becoming indistinguishable from the genuine article.