Song of Home

Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.

May 11, 2015 — The poignancy of Leo McCarey's tearjerker is due as much to the director's scrupulous aesthetic choices as his unforgettable characters and story.

Jan 28, 2014 — Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Jan 30, 2013 — The improvisational arts of filmmaking, jazz, and chili.

Jun 12, 2012 — Hal Ashby’s delicately off-kilter May-December romance stars two of the unlikeliest countercultural icons of the seventies.

Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...

Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .

Feb 21, 2007 — It was bound to happen. After a good start for the blog, a quiet stretch. The year has gotten off to a busy start. Every minute there seems to be a meeting with a new player about a new technology...

May 22, 2006 — Barbara Kopple’s detailed analysis of a Kentucky mine workers’ strike is a virtual hub of urgent themes, formal tendencies, political debates, and material practices that define post-sixties documentary in America.

Apr 25, 2005 — Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film marks the beginning of the Polish School, the paradigm of Polish cinema that arose from the political and cultural thaw of the mid-1950s.