So Close

Aug 27, 2017 — Tobe Hooper, whose 1974 shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “became one of the most influential horror films of all time,” as Pat Saperstein puts it in Variety, has passed away at the age of seventy-four. Saperstein: “Shot for less...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...

Aug 21, 2017 — When Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas fled Lithuania in 1944 only to land in a Nazi forced-labor camp, Jonas began to keep a diary. Entries from that diary are gathered in I Had Nowhere to Go, out now from...

Aug 17, 2017 — With Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time in theaters, the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang talks with Robert Pattinson about his cinephilia, which took root when he was a teen. “Godard’s Prénom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen) was a massive one...

Aug 16, 2017 — French New Wave icon Jeanne Moreau possessed a stillness, a way of surrendering to the camera, that made her utterly unique among modern actors.

Aug 11, 2017 — “Mrs. Fang is a study of a face and a sober essay on death,” writes Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. “It’s also about fishing. As profoundly moving as it is troubling, this new masterwork from documentary filmmaker Wang Bing...

Aug 10, 2017 — Ian Buruma, who’ll become the new editor of the New York Review of Books next month, has a piece in the new issue on The Memory of Justice, “the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is...

Aug 10, 2017 — “The Coen brothers’ secretive new project The Ballad of Buster Scruggs has landed at Netflix,” reports Zack Sharf for IndieWire. The Western anthology, shot in New Mexico and premiering next year, “tells six distinct stories set on the American frontier....

Aug 10, 2017 — “Stylish swagger goes full-tilt boogie in Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres), the latest delirious exercise in lovingly retro pastiche from Brussels-based writer-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani,” begins Neil Young in the Hollywood Reporter. “Having amassed a...

Aug 6, 2017 — “First there is the darkness of a limestone mine, lit only by helmet flashlights and the occasional shower of flinty sparks from a pickax connecting with rock,” begins Jessica Kiang in Variety. “And then there’s the comparative dazzle of the...