The Electric State

Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...

Jan 14, 2025 — In this digressive, intensely interior masterpiece, Jean Eustache mines the dramas of his past romances while also capturing the disillusionment of young Parisians in the aftermath of May 1968.

Feb 4, 2022 — This week: Céline Sciamma, Julia Ducournau, Jane Campion, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve.

Apr 20, 2010 — In 1992, I went to Paris to see some movies that weren’t turning up on these shores, at least not as quickly as I wanted them to. At the time, it meant something particular to be going to Paris to...

Nov 12, 2017 — On November 4, almost a month to the day after Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times on the accusations of sexual harassment and abuse leveled against Harvey Weinstein, Mark Harris tweeted: “Thing I've been hearing...

Jun 14, 2017 — New York’s BAMcinemaFest opens tonight with Aaron Katz’s Gemini and closes on June 24 with Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits. “Now celebrating its ninth year, this modest yet prestigious festival, so shrewdly curated, so reliably comprehensive a treasury of contemporary...

Mar 15, 2022 — A captivatingly unclassifiable leading man in the 1980s, Hurt often returned to his first passion—the theater.

Sep 6, 2017 — “Murray Lerner, a seminal music documentary filmmaker of the 60s and 70s, has died at age 90 in New York City,” reports Paula Parisi for Variety. “Lerner won an Oscar for best documentary in 1981 for From Mozart to Mao:...

Jun 24, 2019 — A work of rapturous energy, John Cameron Mitchell’s beloved debut feature is a freewheeling rock-and-roll musical suffused with heartbreak and pleasure.

Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...