The Word

Feb 21, 2020 — Songbook “In an instant, I remembered everything.” The Cure, “The Walk” It’s the mid-1980s, and a student in a black leather jacket walks down the hall of Polytechnic of North London. Her hair is dyed a shocking orange, maybe to...

Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...

Sep 27, 2017 — The fifty-fifth edition of the New York Film Festival opens tomorrow and runs through October 15. In his latest “Cinema ’67 Revisited” column for Film Comment, Mark Harris looks back at the fifth edition, noting that “Susan Sontag began her...

Aug 15, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has announced the titles lined up for the Masters, Contemporary World Cinema, Wavelengths, and Primetime programs of its forty-second edition, running from September 7 through 17, and added more Gala and Special Presentations.Earlier rounds: The...

May 31, 2017 — New Taiwan Cinema master Edward Yang’s sophomore feature explores the conflict between tradition and modernity reflected in a relationship on the rocks.

May 22, 2017 — “Philippe Garrel has always only needed the barest means to make movie magic,” begins Daniel Kasman in the Notebook: “a beautiful, tragic face, a sad wall to put behind it, a mournful, pensive walk alone on the street. He is...

Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...

May 27, 2014 — Howard Hawks was both a skillful Hollywood craftsman and a deeply personal artist, and this western of uncommon wit and grandeur is among his greatest and quirkiest films.

Oct 25, 2013 — "I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line...

Aug 9, 2013 — Did You See This?• An early Orson Welles film unearthed and being restored • Remembering the divine Karen Black in words and moving pictures • Yasujiro Ozu as you’ve never seen him • Investigating the essay film • Admiring the...