…Reel Two

Feb 20, 2018 — David Bordwell has revisited The Donovan Affair (1929), “Columbia’s first all-talking picture, and Frank Capra’s as well.” It’s “an unusually fluid early talkie” and studying it teaches us “some things about those transitional years 1928-1932, when filmmakers were figuring out...

Feb 19, 2018 — New York. Anthology Film Archives’ series Documentarists for a Day runs for two more nights, and Screen Slate is spotlighting the two films screening tomorrow. Theater in Trance (1981) is the only documentary Rainer Werner Fassbinder made. Angeline Gragásin: “Comprised...

Jan 29, 2018 — This weekend was about the Grammys, of course, but it wasn’t all about the Grammys. As Guy Lodge reports for Variety, Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri “may be proving the most critically divisive of this year’s top Oscar...

Jan 8, 2018 — New York. “If the promise of canonical film school heartthrobs—among them Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, and Michel Piccoli—gorging and fucking themselves to death in a provincial villa sets your heart a-racing, close that incognito tab and treat yourself to La...

Dec 12, 2017 — “Evil is ascendant,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “The Resistance—an intrepid, multi-everything group whose leaders include a battle-tested woman warrior—has been fighting the good fight for years but is outnumbered and occasionally outmaneuvered. Yes, the latest Star...

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Nov 5, 2017 — New York. “It’s probably pure coincidence that BAM is presenting a week of Sam Shepard films right as the Metrograph screens five days of Dennis Hopper–directed titles,” writes Bilge Ebiri. “No two actors of their generation better expressed the modern...

Oct 23, 2017 — David Bordwell’s new book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, is out, and we’ll be hearing more about it soon. For now, though, New Yorkers will want to know that Bordwell’s coming to town, specifically to the Museum...

Sep 21, 2017 — The editors of Senses of Cinema open Issue 84 with a “near exhaustive dossier” on Christian Petzold and a second entitled “Sartre at the Movies.” Here, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of French cinema, Dudley Andrew, explores the ideas...

Aug 20, 2017 — “Jerry Lewis, the brash slapstick comic who teamed with Dean Martin in the 1950s and later starred in The Nutty Professor and The Bellboy before launching the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, has died,” report Richard Natale and Carmel Dagan for Variety....