Film Portrait

May 23, 2017 — Continuing my trip through Cannes history, today I’m focusing on one of the most celebrated works of Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, who became an international sensation partly thanks to the booing and heckling he endured at the Cannes premiere of...

May 22, 2017 — Abel Ferrara’s “visits to Cannes almost invariably turn into special occasions, whether he's hosting an off-fest screening of an incendiary Dominique Strauss-Kahn film à clef or, in 2008, offering his opinion of the Bad Lieutenant remake,” writes Ben Kenigsberg at...

May 22, 2017 — A portrait of childhood, domestic life, and consumerism in postwar suburban Tokyo, Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning is one of the Japanese master’s most charming and subtly incisive comedies. Made in 1959, this loose update of the director’s own 1932 silent...

May 22, 2017 — “Michael Haneke is back to many of his old tricks in Happy End, which enfolds the child psychopathy of Benny’s Video, the bourgeois nightmare of Hidden, the euthanasia theme of Amour, and the racial discomfort of Code Unknown into a...

May 22, 2017 — “She is an 88-year-old film directing icon with a two-tone purple rinse,” begins David Jenkins at Little White Lies. “He is a 33-year-old photographer and conceptual artist who likes to wear a silly little trilby hat. Together, they amble around...

May 20, 2017 — “Robin Campillo’s 120 Battements Par Minute [BPM (Beats Per Minute)] is a passionately acted ensemble movie about ACT UP in France in the late 80s, the confrontational direct-action movement which demanded immediate, large-scale research into AIDS,” begins the Guardian’s Peter...

May 20, 2017 — “The film industry is full of unassuming figures quietly holding everything together without ever demanding a share of the limelight,” begins Gwilym Mumford in the Guardian. Filmworker, a “tender documentary” premiering in the Cannes Classics program, “makes time to profile...

May 20, 2017 — “To fans of the mononymous Barbara—the delicate-voiced, emotionally acute French chanteuse adored by everyone from Jacques Brel to François Mitterand—Mathieu Amalric’s mega-meta, dreamily blurred biopic-within-a-film may seem a bemusing tribute to a national icon,” writes Guy Lodge at the top...

May 8, 2017 — With his mix of documentary-like immediacy and profound moral inquiry, Roberto Rossellini became a pioneer of Italian neorealism, a movement that transformed the way filmmakers captured the fabric of everyday life and and grappled with the most urgent social issues...

Apr 21, 2017 — Twenty years after it first premiered on the IFC Channel, the pioneering program Split Screen stands as a priceless portrait of America’s wide-ranging, often quirky filmmaking community coming into its own. This irreverent show mixed footage of creator and host...