To the Stars

Jan 19, 2018 — “With issues of women’s equality, sexual misconduct, and political turmoil heavy on the movie world’s mind, Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper said he wanted to start the 2018 edition with a movie that’s ‘fun to the point of sassy,’”...

Jan 7, 2018 — This past Christmas Eve, Jonas Mekas—filmmaker, poet, critic, co-founder of the journal Film Culture and New York’s Anthology Film Archives—turned ninety-five, certainly occasion enough for IndieWire’s Eric Kohn to get a few words with him. They discuss government support for...

Dec 30, 2017 — Cinema lost a few giants this year, some soldiers, some heroes, duly heralded or not, and links from a good number of the names here will take you to collections of remembrances. I’ve also added notes and a few more...

Dec 27, 2017 — Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost some writers who’ve made unique contributions to film criticism. At Film Studies for Free, Catherine Grant has posted an entry in memory of “radical film and media scholar” Chuck Kleinhans. “Along with...

Dec 22, 2017 — “There are two basic types of Errol Morris film,” writes Evan Kindley in the Nation: One is the character study of an obsessive individual pursuing a difficult, perhaps impossible goal. Morris loves his Ahabs: the animal-obsessed eccentrics of Fast, Cheap...

Dec 7, 2017 — In the new issue of Film Quarterly, editor B. Ruby Rich argues that cinema and television “are lagging behind those offscreen realities known as world events or, in online parlance, IRW (In Real World). And yes, this is a film...

Dec 7, 2017 — “I think that every movie gets better the second time around if you love it,” Guillermo del Toro tells Matt Zoller Seitz in an excerpt from a new book by Seitz and Simon Abrams, Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone....

Dec 6, 2017 — “There’s topical, there’s timely, and then there’s The Post, which feels less like a historical thriller set in 1971 than it does an exhilarating caricature of the year 2017,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “While Steven Spielberg’s latest film rivetingly...

Nov 29, 2017 — The National Board of Review, established in 1909 and now boasting over 100 members, has named Steven Spielberg’s The Post as the best film of 2017. The Post won’t open until December 22 and reviews are embargoed until this coming...

Nov 25, 2017 — New York. “It’s the Jacques Rivette movie for people who can’t stand Jacques Rivette movies—and yet no one else could’ve made it.” Michael Atkinson for the Village Voice: “La Belle Noiseuse (1991), now restored and rereleased in all its four-solid-hour...