The Summer Book

Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda The poster for the seventy-second Cannes Film Festival, held in May 2019, used a photograph taken during the shooting of Agnès Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954. Wearing rolled-up trousers, a shirt,...

Jul 22, 2020 — Here’s the latest on how Venice, Toronto, Locarno, and other festivals are radically rethinking this year’s editions.

Jul 3, 2020 — As The War of the Worlds is essentially a cautionary tale, each generation gets its own adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic account of extraterrestrial invasion—one of the several seminal science-fiction novels, also including The Time Machine (1895) and The...

Jun 15, 2020 — This month we’re looking at books on topics ranging from Japanese animation to Hollywood movie stars to jazz on the big screen.

May 14, 2020 — Sorely missing the festival this year, filmmakers and critics swap memories and reflections.

Jan 21, 2020 — The Mankiewicz brothers, Jonas Mekas, Werner Herzog, Sidney Lumet, and Ja’Tovia Gary all figure in this month’s roundup.

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Nov 26, 2019 — A smart and lively adaptation of a 150-year-old classic is warmly greeted in the first round of reviews.

Nov 20, 2019 — A new collection of essays connects the dots between Farber’s paintings and film criticism.

Nov 6, 2019 — Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall (1979) is one of the highlights in a program of over 300 films.