Propaganda

Jan 19, 2018 — Two marvels of midcentury social commentary now streaming on the Criterion Channel show how progress can be a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward process.

Jan 13, 2018 — Even as we anxiously await If Beale Street Could Talk, based on the novel by James Baldwin and Barry Jenkins’s followup to Moonlight (image above: directing Alex R. Hibbert), he’s already attached to another project, as Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr....

Jan 2, 2018 — New York. “Starting in the mid-1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni became what the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger would call a ‘tourist of the revolution,’” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times. “Antonioni left Italy to make Blow-Up (1966) in swinging...

Dec 25, 2017 — New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama rolls on through January 7. “The genre of melodrama, which displays the grand, tragic passions that mark everyday lives while also detailing historical events that knock those...

Dec 14, 2017 — Following the announcement that Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs will be opening the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival (February 15 through 25), the Berlinale now presents the first eleven titles lined up for its Panorama section, including new work from Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata),...

Dec 10, 2017 — Awards season brings us not only lists and prizes but also roundtables. The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen’s recently led a conversation among seven directors: Darren Aronofsky (mother!), Sean Baker (The Florida Project), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit), Guillermo del Toro (The...

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 29, 2017 — The Sundance Film Festival, whose 2018 edition will run from January 18 through 28, has announced the lineups for its U.S. Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, and its Next, Spotlight, Premieres, Documentary Premieres, Midnight, and...

Nov 21, 2017 — Ernst Lubitsch’s “world is defined by time as much as place,” writes Daniel Witkin in the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time. “Anachronistically straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, his characters embody unfashionable virtues of discretion and tact...

Nov 2, 2017 — In the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri looks back to the day in 1992 when, as a college freshman, he dropped everything, skipped his classes, and took a train from New Haven to New York to see a movie: Orson Welles’s...