The Documentary

Jan 23, 2018 — “It’s not every day that you witness a new cinematic language being born, but watching RaMell Ross’s evocatively titled documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening qualifies,” argues Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “The director, a photographer and teacher...

Jan 21, 2018 — “In a festival that rarely wants for political currency,” writes Justin Chang in a dispatch from Sundance to the Los Angeles Times, “it’s surely no coincidence that Blindspotting and Monsters and Men, the first two films to screen in this...

Jan 15, 2018 — Big announcement today from the Berlin International Film Festival, whose sixty-eighth edition runs from February 15 through 25. Following the first round of titles slated for the Competition and Berlinale Special revealed last month, the Berlinale’s now added another thirteen....

Dec 29, 2017 — From C. Mason Wells comes word that Dan Talbot, founder of New Yorker Films (and pictured above in front of the New Yorker Theater with Alfred Hitchcock), has passed away. “Alongside his wife Toby, few did more for world cinema...

Dec 29, 2017 — We open a round of holiday listening and viewing with Bill Simmons and Sean Fennessey’s conversation (99’38”) at the Ringer with Paul Thomas Anderson about Phantom Thread, the few brief clashes he had with Burt Reynolds on the set of...

Dec 25, 2017 — New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama rolls on through January 7. “The genre of melodrama, which displays the grand, tragic passions that mark everyday lives while also detailing historical events that knock those...

Dec 21, 2017 — The result of a tumultuous production, Orson Welles’s eccentric take on Othello infuses the play with a convulsive rhythm and disorienting sense of abstraction.

Dec 15, 2017 — The International Film Festival Rotterdam has been rolling out the lineup for its 2018 edition (January 24 through February 4) in quick spurts over the past few weeks, and it’s far from complete. But there’s already more than enough to...

Oct 4, 2017 — We begin with Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker about Alain Gomis’s Félicité, “a dramatic portrait of a fierce, intrepid woman—a single mother and a powerfully expressive cabaret singer (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) in Kinshasa who is wrenched from...

Aug 22, 2017 — French cinema titan Sacha Guitry brings a savage misanthropy to this exploration of a toxic marriage and the arbitrariness of the legal system.