The Little American

Sep 13, 2019 — Nicholas Britell’s scores are so finely calibrated to the movies they inhabit that they become inextricable from the images on-screen. Whether it’s the staccato heartbeat of orchestral strings in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight or the mix of piano motifs and hip-hop...

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

Apr 9, 2018 — “Most famous for the exquisite 1979 family classic The Black Stallion, and, to a slightly lesser extent, 1996’s Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin-starring drama Far Away Home, [Carroll] Ballard is—despite making only six films in a period of almost forty...

Apr 2, 2018 — Updates are still coming into the first entry on this year’s New Directors/New Films running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This entry will take us all the way through...

Apr 1, 2018 — Empire has been rolling out interviews from its “Spielberg Takeover” issue, the one with five different covers, including a podcast (102’01”) that’s naturally not part of the print version, in which contributors talk with Steven Spielberg himself and with Simon...

Mar 14, 2018 — “How could I have written a longish book on 1940s Hollywood and have devoted so little space to Casablanca?” asks David Bordwell. The book is Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, and “I suppose I neglected Warners’ evergreen...

Mar 3, 2018 — So this is the weekend that finally brings awards season to an end. The Film Independent Spirit Awards will be presented tonight (and here’s an overview of the nominations), and tomorrow’s the Big Night (again, the nominations). The one piece...

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...

Jan 21, 2018 — “After innumerable plays, books, films, made-for-TV series and specials, and even an opera and a musical, you would think popular culture would have exhausted all the options for telling the story of Lizzie Borden, the New England woman who was...

May 24, 2017 — “Cinema lost one of its pre-eminent pioneers when Abbas Kiarostami died on July 4, 2016,” writes Giovanni Marchini Camia at the Film Stage, where he notes that 24 Frames “was as good as finished” at the time of his passing....