Day of Freedom

Aug 20, 2017 — “Jerry Lewis, the brash slapstick comic who teamed with Dean Martin in the 1950s and later starred in The Nutty Professor and The Bellboy before launching the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, has died,” report Richard Natale and Carmel Dagan for Variety....

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...

Jul 24, 2017 — On Friday, we posted an entry on all that’s known—and speculated—about the seventy-fourth edition of the the Venice International Film Festival running from August 30 through September 9. Over the weekend the festival filled out the juries. Annette Bening will...

Jun 6, 2017 — Once again, we open an entry with a tip from Catherine Grant, the new twelfth issue of Cine-Files, a special commemorative issue “dedicated to the films and artistic legacy of Jacques Rivette and Chris Marker.” Editor Mary Wiles: “Both directors,...

May 23, 2017 — “For ardent Hong Sangsoo fans, 2017 couldn’t be a more rewarding year,” writes Bradley Warren at the Playlist. “Not just because the South Korean filmmaker has three new films ready—the first, On the Beach at Night Alone, launched in Berlin—or...

May 21, 2017 — “Arguably, more question marks hung over the prospect of Redoubtable than over any other film in Cannes this year,” begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. “One reason was the idea of Michel Hazanavicius, director of the world-beating The Artist, seeming too...

May 18, 2017 — Loveless is “two hours of gorgeously gloomy existential despair courtesy of the well-regarded Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “Often touted as an heir to Tarkovsky, Russian cinema’s other famously austere Andrey, Zvyagintsev previously...

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...

Jul 30, 2013 — Guillermo del Toro’s ghostly fable beautifully reflects the director’s fascination with the personal and the political.

Jul 23, 2013 — Asked by French journalists in a 2001 interview what recent films he most admired, Brian De Palma named Ang Lee’s 1997 The Ice Storm. It was surprising to hear one of the leaders of a filmmaking revolution that aimed at...