Polar

Feb 22, 2018 — Luis Buñuel was born on this day, February 22, in 1900. “By 1961, Buñuel was born again, so to speak,” writes Jeremy Carr, having sketched the career from Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930) through the years in...

Feb 19, 2018 — Jonathan Demme put an uncompromisingly feminist spin on the law-enforcement procedural with this wildly successful, Oscar-winning drama.

Feb 5, 2018 — This year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the occasion for Jill Lepore’s outstanding piece in this week’s New Yorker: Frankenstein is four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an...

Nov 17, 2017 — G rasshopper Film has posted Ted Fendt’s essay on Moses and Aaron (1974), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera: “Straub and Huillet’s brilliance—and a fundamental aspect of their method of adaptation—is to allow the contradictions...

Oct 16, 2017 — J. Hoberman will be at Light Industry in New York tomorrow evening to introduce a program of films he’s calling Against Riefenstahl: Charles A. Ridley’s The Lambeth Walk (1940), Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak’s Why We Fight: The Nazis Strike...

Sep 18, 2017 — 1. The first Newport Folk Festivals took place in 1959 and 1960 and were the result of a collaboration between Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein and Albert Grossman, who at the time were partners in music and artist management....

Sep 11, 2017 — In this documentary portrait of the Newport Folk Festival, Murray Lerner captured seismic changes in American music and politics.

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...

Jun 9, 2017 — “The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century. So Far.” Frankly, this time of year, my cursor tends to fly right over a headline like that, having worn itself out on such lists from Thanksgiving through Oscar Night. But this...

May 27, 2017 — “Some filmmakers rust during periods of inactivity,” begins Guy Lodge in Variety. “Lynne Ramsay arches and tenses, lying in wait like an attack dog. And attack she does, though not in all the expected ways, in her astonishing fourth feature...