The Sea

Oct 29, 2018 — Supporting roles bring potent flavor to classic Hollywood’s darkest genre. In the first installment of a series, Imogen Sara Smith pays tribute to the queen of character actors: Thelma Ritter.

Jun 20, 2018 — Françoise Bonnot, who passed away last week at the age of seventy-eight­, was one of the world’s most versatile and seasoned film editors, with a five-decade career that encompassed work with such international auteurs as Costa-Gavras, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Volker Schlöndorff. But...

Apr 15, 2018 — La Semaine de la Critique, or Critics’ Week, has announced the lineup for its fifty-seventh edition, running from May 9 through 17 in Cannes. The opening film will be Paul Dano’s Wildlife, and I gathered a first round of reviews...

Jan 29, 2018 — “It is an altogether extraordinary life, the stuff of epic,” writes Simon Callow, having just taken us from milestone to milestone in the first fifteen paragraphs of an outstanding piece for the New York Review of Books. “And now, it...

Jan 23, 2018 — Last week we saw the first four titles lined up for this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week, the independent program that, like its counterparts in Cannes and Venice, runs parallel to its city’s big festival, the Berlinale. Below, an overview; you...

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 19, 2017 — With the addition of eight features, a virtual reality experience, and hosted retrospectives, the lineup for the 2018 Sundance Film Festival (January 18 through 28) is now complete. Previously announced are the features programs, the lineups for the new Indie...

Nov 13, 2017 — New York. “Largely terra incognita, West German cinema before Fassbinder was distinguished by films made by returning exiles, Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, as well as a number of strong, critical movies, some of them international hits, by Helmut Käutner, who began his career under...

Sep 3, 2017 — “With writer-director James Toback, you never know quite what you’re going to get, quality-wise,” writes Glenn Kenny at RogerEbert.com. “What you do know you’re going to get is something very indicative of the personality of James Toback—defiant, searching, self-indulgent, absurdist,...

Aug 2, 2017 — “Jonathan Demme loved people,” begins Matt Prigge, writing for Metro US. “There are villains in his movies—most notably that charming aesthete Hannibal Lecter, who loved people, too, only as food. And his biggest hits were about strife: the hunt for...