He Was Once

Nov 12, 2019 — The Daytrippers came out in theaters in 1997, back when I was in graduate school at NYU. That was a year when you could rent videotapes everywhere—at Blockbuster, but also at a Laundromat or a bodega. There were still phone booths...

Oct 31, 2019 — A series of films by one of India’s greatest and most fiercely independent directors opens in New York.

Oct 28, 2019 — One Scene In Nadav Lapid’s latest film, the award-winning Synonyms, a young man moves from Tel Aviv to Paris to make a clean break from his Israeli identity. This drastic attempt at self-reinvention is something that Lapid himself endeavored in his...

Sep 20, 2019 — In the winter of 1981, when I was young, I fell madly in love with a handsome poet. About two weeks into our affaire de cœur, we went to the Thalia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see...

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

May 2, 2019 — “To begin with, Gone with the Wind is a woman’s story . . . Mr. Cukor, one of Hollywood’s finest directors and the man who has directed Hepburn and Garbo in some of their best, is known as a woman’s...

Apr 23, 2019 — Elia Kazan can be and has been called many things: a cinematic genius, an actor’s director, a womanizer, a government stoolie, an uncompromising artist and three-time Academy Award winner. But whatever your opinion of his personality, his temperament, or his...

Feb 22, 2019 — If I were to list the criteria for my ideal project, creating a sculpture of Tadzio, the young boy from Death in Venice, for a Criterion release of Luchino Visconti’s adaptation would just about tick off all the boxes. Firstly, I love cinema,...

Nov 19, 2018 — Billy Wilder proves himself one of cinema’s greatest pleasure seekers in this irresistible confection, a landmark of Hollywood comedy.

Jul 19, 2018 — Damien Chazelle’s First Man will open Venice, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will be the NYFF’s Centerpiece presentation.