The Russian Five

Jun 26, 2017 — “There can be no debate over the fact that for most of its history Cannes has been the key launching pad for what will account for a fair percentage of the year’s most important films,” grants Cinema Scope editor Mark...

Jun 16, 2017 — The title of the first part of Tom Paulus’s projected three-part essay for photogénie, “The Love Connection: Another Jam Session on Narrative,” references “Jam Session on Non-Narrative,” a conversation that took place between film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Ehrenstein, and...

Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.

Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...

Feb 2, 2011 — This interview was published in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the Toronto International Film Festival. The photograph appears courtesy of Colleen Murphy. We met on March...

Dec 12, 2022 — Critics, the European Film Academy, and the International Documentary Association spent the weekend listing and awarding.

Jan 31, 2022 — What have the critics been saying about this year’s winners?