What a Way to Go!

Sep 30, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 More than eight decades since its release, Dos monjes (1934) continues to invite reappraisals, as much for its expressionist style—exceptional within Mexican cinema—as for its nonlinear narrative and for the creative contributions of...

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Sep 27, 2019 — Some of the top titles premiering in Berlin, Locarno, and Venice this year are featured in the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate.

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

Mar 11, 2019 — It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of watching a Khalik Allah film to intuit that he’s a photographer. Over the course of just two documentary features, the thirty-four-year-old, New York–bred artist has developed an instantly recognizable style at...

Apr 17, 2018 — “Almost every Steven Spielberg movie has its antecedent in a TV show, a movie serial or a comic book,” wrote Michael Sragow when he spoke with Spielberg for Rolling Stone in 1981. “The one he feels [Raiders of the Lost...

Feb 7, 2018 — Looks like we all missed it. Most of us, anyway. Way back, December 27, Craig Hlavaty reported for the Houston Chronicle that Richard Linklater has been working on a film set in the summer of 1969. And not even quietly....

Jan 23, 2018 — Mandy, screening in the Midnight program at Sundance, “is a midnight-movie festival unto itself,” declares A. A. Dowd at the A.V. Club: “over two gonzo hours, it combines giallo, Clive Barker, Death Wish, prog rock, heavy metal, Heavy Metal, Guy...

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...