Mission

May 19, 2021 — For the last twenty years—until the pandemic broke my streak—I drove each fall to spend a week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Before making the trip, I took care to avoid reading anything about the subjects, characters, or...

May 6, 2021 — Fame, as the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once observed, is reductive. “Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished,” he wrote in 2666, an epic novel published after his death.What Bolaño identified as the...

Apr 23, 2021 — This week we’re reading A. S. Hamrah on the contenders for this year’s Oscars and Ben Hecht on the state of Hollywood in 1938.

Apr 20, 2021 — 1. “I Felt Nothing” In September 2019, about halfway between claiming the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and earning multiple Oscar nominations in January 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite was briefly upstaged by a movie from the director’s past....

Mar 29, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel ups the ante with a collection of some of the greatest films ever made about the pulse-racing highs and gutter-dwelling lows of gambling. We’re also dealing out the Marx Brothers’ anarchic comedies, sublime...

Mar 5, 2021 — This week offers a new magazine, conversations with Guy Maddin and the great women filmmakers of the 1970s, and a new restoration of a Hong Kong classic.

Mar 3, 2021 — Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Dénes Nagy’s Natural Light compete at the Berlinale.

Feb 4, 2021 — Here’s an overview of what critics have been saying about this year’s winners.

Jan 12, 2021 — Nomadland has triumphed on the first big night of awards season.

Dec 4, 2020 — A landmark week for the industry has us looking back to past periods of tumult and change.