PlayTime

Repertory Picks

Jacques Tati’s iconic character Monsieur Hulot gets lost in an absurd modern cityscape in the elaborately choreographed PlayTime, playing this weekend in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ruben Östlund is the director of the acclaimed films Force Majeure and The Square, the latter of which won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

Ken Jennings is the all-time winningest champion in the history of the quiz show Jeopardy!, having won $2.5 million during his seventy-five-game streak in 2004.

Reggie Watts is a multifaceted performer best known for his comedy collaborations and improvisational music sets.

Stella Mozgawa is the drummer for the critically acclaimed Los Angeles band Warpaint, whose albums include 2010’s The Fool and 2014’s Warpaint.

Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled the …

Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) opens in a shiny space: nuns breeze past; a woman in a white uniform clacks through, bearing towels; a baby cries. People wait. The feeling is “hospital.” A second woman in white delivers towels, and we see that h…

In compiling his top ten, Elmes, who shot The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil, chose those films, he says, “that influenced me most.”

French animator Sylvain Chomet, whose idiosyncratic, elegant, hand-drawn style and quirky approach to narrative were introduced to American viewers in 2003’s The Triplets of Belleville, is returning to screens with another largely wordless feature�…

Portuguese director Pedro Costa is the internationally acclaimed, award-winning artist behind the films Ossos, In Vanda’s Room, and Colossal Youth, available from Criterion in the special edition four-DVD box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Film

I suppose it could be argued that I saw Playtime for the first time in ideal circumstances—as an American tourist in Paris. Yet to argue this would mean overlooking the film’s suggestion that, like it or not, we’re all tourists nowadays—and a…

There’s a cornucopia for Tati fans over at Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s blog, Observations on Film Art and Film Art. In a new entry, Thompson spotlights painter Jacques Lagrange, a somewhat unsung collaborator on all of Jacques Tati’s …

This month we asked critic Robin Wood—whose books include Hitchcock’s Films and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and who recently wrote essays for the Criterion releases The Furies and Le plaisir—to pick his ten favorite films in the collection

After the success of Mon Oncle in 1958, Jacques Tati had become fed up with Monsieur Hulot, his signature comic creation. With international renown came a growing dissatisfaction with straightforward scenarios centered around one lovable, recognizabl…