I Am What I Am

Mar 14, 2005 — A director is naturally a man like everyone else. Yet his life isn’t normal. For us, seeing is a necessity. For a painter, too, the problem is to see. But while the painter has to discover a static reality, or...

Jun 21, 2004 — Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his...

Sep 29, 2003 — “Gray literature” is the term German film historians use to describe the material written purely for publicity purposes and made available to the press, but not meant for official publication. Often this gray literature, which is only accessible to film...

Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.

Dec 4, 1995 — While Carol Reed’s psychological noir is the most compassionate of movies, it’s a poetic summary of twentieth century harshness—of what can be called the inhuman condition.

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

Jun 26, 2026 — We’re tracking the unconventional flows of Zidane, Eephus, and Castration Movie; plus Pedro Costa on Mizoguchi and Tourneur.

Jun 18, 2026 — We’re wrapping the week with top docs, Black writers, screwball comedies, and appreciations of Raoul Peck and Jafar Panahi.

Jun 18, 2026 — Over the course of his first three documentaries—Helvetica (2007), Objectified (2009), and Urbanized (2011)—Gary Hustwit established a clean and clear cinematic language that he used to describe the complex and often contradictory systems of thinking that designers use to shape...

May 27, 2026 — When Joachim Trier made his debut in 2006 with the film Reprise, I felt as if a veil had been lifted. There was nothing wrong with Norwegian cinema before Trier’s arrival, but it always seemed to be about someone else,...