The Master of Apipucos

Mar 1, 2018 — “His face did something to me. Or, rather, the film, with its compassion and its utterly jarring ending, which I won’t give away, did something to me. But, then again, you could also say that, in some sense, the film...

Feb 10, 2018 — “Over a decade and a half in the making,” begins Mitch Anzuoni in the new issue of the Brooklyn Rail, “From The Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader is the first comprehensive look at Barney Rosset and Grove Press’s...

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...

Jan 8, 2018 — “If you were dream-casting the role of Golden Globes host for the season of #MeToo and #TimesUp, with black-clad attendees from TV series and films that confronted misogyny (The Handmaid’s Tale) and racism (Get Out) and a barnburner of a...

Dec 30, 2017 — Cinema lost a few giants this year, some soldiers, some heroes, duly heralded or not, and links from a good number of the names here will take you to collections of remembrances. I’ve also added notes and a few more...

Dec 29, 2017 — We open a round of holiday listening and viewing with Bill Simmons and Sean Fennessey’s conversation (99’38”) at the Ringer with Paul Thomas Anderson about Phantom Thread, the few brief clashes he had with Burt Reynolds on the set of...

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 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 16, 2017 — One of the masters of the French crime film explains how the film-noir form serves as a convenient vehicle for exploring such elemental human themes as freedom and betrayal.

Nov 1, 2017 — “If you go to a single production this season, make it this one.” That’s Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic for the New York Times, enthusiastically recommending Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, an opera inspired by Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film and...