To the Wonder

Sep 4, 2017 — “Lebanon director Samuel Maoz went in a risky direction by making a film as different and daring as Foxtrot,” writes Jay Weissberg for Variety, “and his boldness pays off in ways that make one reach for superlatives. Not content to...

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 30, 2017 — “Can there be any clearer signal of reality warping as we hurtle toward imminent apocalypse than the fact that Alexander Payne has made a life-affirming film?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Venice opener Downsizing takes the long road getting...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...

Aug 15, 2017 — “Given that this edition of Locarno was its 70th, it was a shame that no special anniversary prize was created and bestowed on Raúl Ruíz's gloriously strange The Wandering Soap Opera,” finds James Lattimer at the House Next Door. “The...

Aug 10, 2017 — Ian Buruma, who’ll become the new editor of the New York Review of Books next month, has a piece in the new issue on The Memory of Justice, “the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is...

Aug 8, 2017 — “Mrs. Géquil is a delicate woman, at least in the eyes of her patronizing husband (played by José Garcia) as well as, perhaps, in the eyes of her boss and the vast majority of the students in her class,” begins...

Aug 7, 2017 — The big news to catch up with here is the launch of Film Critic: Adrian Martin, “almost 20 years, on and off, in the making.” Adrian Martin has been writing essential film criticism for four decades now, and what’s collected...

Aug 5, 2017 — “Two gloriously muscled bodybuilders eye each other with distrust, envy and contempt at the gym in Denis Côte’s A Soft the Skin.” That’s one of the moments from the first days of this year’s Locarno Festival that has stuck with...

Jul 25, 2017 — “So,” wrote Chris Marker in 2003, looking back on his school days, “with scissors, glue and crystal paper, I made a faithful copy of the actual Pathéorama reel. After that, frame by frame, I began to draw a series of...