At War

Sep 4, 2019 — After Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, it’s Timothée Chalamet’s turn to lead the English to the Battle of Agincourt.

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Aug 30, 2019 — In 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, after being censured for its invasion of Manchuria. Despite this, the majority of Japanese people remained avid consumers of American movies and Western fashion, which exasperated the militarists in power. A...

Aug 28, 2019 — 1. Before he became a filmmaker, D. A. Pennebaker’s ambition was to play stride piano like Fats Waller. “What changed your mind?” I asked him. “Well,” Penny replied, “after I saw Fats play . . . ” Penny would have...

Aug 24, 2019 — The irrepressible Samuel Fuller had quite the career, beginning his apprenticeship in the cutthroat world of New York newspapers at the age of twelve and going on to become a decorated veteran of World War II, before making a name...

Aug 15, 2019 — A stylish and sensitive storyteller with a powerfully romantic vision, Frank Borzage was one of the great filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age, making more than a hundred movies, in a wide array of genres, over the course of a nearly...

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

Aug 13, 2019 — As Toronto’s full lineup nears completion, New York looks to expand upon “our notions of what the moving image can do and be.”

Aug 13, 2019 — Something uncanny is brewing in George Sikharulidze’s Fatherland. This darkly comedic film transports us to a spring evening in Joseph Stalin’s birthplace—Gori, Georgia—where the townspeople have gathered on the sixty-third anniversary of their long-departed leader’s death. What follows is part...

Aug 7, 2019 — The last two days have seen an avalanche of titles filling up the fall festival lineups.