Film Portrait

Jan 23, 2024 — In the first ten years of her extraordinary career, the Belgian filmmaker used the raw materials of quotidian, marginal lives to spark a radical reinvention of cinema.

May 31, 2023 — It’s not every year that so many critics are pleased with the juries’ choices.

Jun 29, 2022 — A fresh round on biographies and studies of filmmakers and actors as well as a few novel ideas and critical collections.

Feb 26, 2020 — Before making history last year as the first black woman director to compete at Cannes, Mati Diop had been spending the previous ten years articulating her unique vision in a series of five acclaimed short films. The praise Diop has...

Jul 16, 2019 — When Alan J. Pakula began preparing for the production of Klute (1971), he screened a lot of Alfred Hitchcock films. He looked at Notorious and admired Ingrid Bergman’s work. He revisited Strangers on a Train, struggling with the climactic merry-go-round...

May 21, 2019 — Malick’s rendering of the true story of a conscientious objector has split the critics.

Jan 9, 2019 — There’s a certain tall-tale quality to Sandi Tan’s life. When the California-based filmmaker was growing up in Singapore in the 1980s and ’90s, movies were a powerful way of experiencing the world beyond her small native country, a place she...

Jan 3, 2019 — We look ahead to films by Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, Paul Verhoeven, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and dozens more.

Oct 23, 2017 — The week starts off with a new trailer (embedded below), poster, and, via Jordan Raup at the Film Stage, an official synopsis for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread:Set in the glamour of 1950s post-war London, renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel...

May 21, 2017 — “Arguably, more question marks hung over the prospect of Redoubtable than over any other film in Cannes this year,” begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. “One reason was the idea of Michel Hazanavicius, director of the world-beating The Artist, seeming too...