After the war

Mar 6, 2020 — Above photo: © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLCIn America, black musical genius has never been in short supply, though it hasn’t always been recognized or fairly compensated. Even a casual glance at the résumé of formally trained composer, producer, and arranger...

Oct 31, 2019 — A series of films by one of India’s greatest and most fiercely independent directors opens in New York.

Sep 4, 2019 — With their novelistic density and sexual openness, the films of French master André Téchiné introduced director Stephen Cone to a strange new world of contradictions.

Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...

Jul 8, 2019 — With his incomparable adaptation of War and Peace, filmmaker Sergei Bondarchuk sought to surpass King Vidor’s 1956 big-budget Hollywood spin on Leo Tolstoy’s novel in dramatic heft and dazzling spectacle, a task in which he certainly succeeded. Over the course...

Jul 3, 2019 — Punk has been tamed, punk has been neutered, punk has been domesticated. The album The Stooges is fifty years old this August, and the music of omnidirectional bile and antiauthoritarianism that it anticipated has been museumified, the subject of a...

Jun 5, 2018 — Both award-winning directors are committing to television projects even as they carry on making feature films.

May 9, 2018 — 1. Born Arutin Sayadyan, eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova—whose pen name means “King of Songs”—served as the initial inspiration for The Color of Pomegranates. Sayat-Nova was an ashugh, a troubadour whose verses were set to music that he played on a...

Apr 15, 2018 — La Semaine de la Critique, or Critics’ Week, has announced the lineup for its fifty-seventh edition, running from May 9 through 17 in Cannes. The opening film will be Paul Dano’s Wildlife, and I gathered a first round of reviews...

Apr 13, 2018 — “Miloš Forman, the anti-authoritarian director who left his native Czechoslovakia for creative freedom in the U.S. and captured Oscars for the masterpieces One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, has died.” Duane Byrge for the Hollywood Reporter: “Forman first...