The Big Year

Oct 2, 2020 — The Lady Eve, from 1941, is my favorite of all of Preston Sturges’s comedies. I would wager to say that it’s Barbara Stanwyck’s best performance, though I also love her in Double Indemnity and Forty Guns. Heck, I love her in everything she’s in. But...

Feb 1, 2018 — G. W. Pabst’s breathlessly paced reimagining of a mine disaster makes an urgent plea for international cooperation in the post–World War I era.

Dec 12, 2017 — Before turning to the cities, we have a bit of festival news. The Locarno Festival, whose seventy-first edition will run from August 1 through 11, has announced that its “major Retrospective will be dedicated to three-time Oscar winner Leo McCarey...

Sep 15, 2017 — “Harry Dean Stanton, the character actor with the world-weary face who carved out an exceptional career playing grizzled loners and colorful, offbeat characters in such films as Paris, Texas and Repo Man, has died.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes and...

Jun 22, 2017 — The new issue of Senses of Cinema opens with a whopping dossier on Budd Boetticher (1916–2001). In his introduction, Dean Brandum notes that “in 1960, at the very moment he seemed destined for A-list status, he walked away from Hollywood,...

Jun 1, 2017 — Earlier this spring, Ryuichi Sakamoto gave an exquisitely intimate concert at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Surrounded by a small audience in the venue’s opulent Veterans Room, the renowned Japanese composer was positioned in the center of the...

May 20, 2017 — “Robin Campillo’s 120 Battements Par Minute [BPM (Beats Per Minute)] is a passionately acted ensemble movie about ACT UP in France in the late 80s, the confrontational direct-action movement which demanded immediate, large-scale research into AIDS,” begins the Guardian’s Peter...

Dec 20, 2016 — With only three features under her belt, German director Maren Ade has become one of contemporary cinema’s keenest observers of human behavior.

Sep 28, 2015 — Rarely has schizophrenia been closer to the surface of American cinema than in the transitional period of 1968–71. Hollywood had just abandoned its censorship code after nearly thirty-five years, and the behemoth studios were heaving and rattling into oblivion or...

Jan 22, 2013 — With his unique use of new 3D technology, Wim Wenders found an unprecedented way for the movie camera to capture bodies in space.