The Call

Aug 10, 2023 — “You’re the company I waited so long for,” Dr. Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) says to her three Self Replicating Automatons in Teknolust (2002), artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s sci-fi farce about a scientist’s well-meaning pursuit of artificial life. Stone’s color-coded clones...

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

Jul 25, 2023 — A master class in dramatic tension and pacing, Carl Franklin’s neonoir masterpiece explores the desperate energy and desperate deeds that fuel real crime.

Jul 19, 2023 — This month we’re reading Pasolini, Chris Marker, Christian Petzold, Lorenza Mazzetti, Derek Jarman, and more.

Jul 11, 2023 — Martin Scorsese drew on the influence of Hitchcock and Kafka for this anxiety-ridden tale of one bizarre night in New York City—a movie that energized him during a tumultuous period in his career.

Apr 10, 2023 — Ian Penman’s new book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is neither a straight-ahead biography nor an orderly critical analysis.

Feb 7, 2023 — A series in Melbourne spotlights Guerra’s work with Antonioni, Fellini, Tarkovsky, and Angelopoulos.

Jan 20, 2023 — This week: Jerzy Skolimowski, Alice Diop, Alexander Hammid, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Orson Welles.

Jan 19, 2023 — The frequent collaborators talk about their close friendship, the paths that led them to each other, and the artistic values they share.

Jan 9, 2023 — The films in the Criterion Channel collection Free Jazz chronicle the development of a deeply experimental music that has baffled and enthralled listeners in equal measure.