Close-Up

Jan 26, 2018 — We turn first to IndieWire’s David Ehrlich: “‘The emotions you are having are not your own, they are someone else’s. You are not the cat—you are inside the cat.’ So begins Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, an ecstatically disorienting experience that...

Jan 24, 2018 — We begin with Rolling Stone’s David Fear: “Pick any random song by the Coup—we suggest ‘Fat Cats, Bigga Fish’ from their 1994 album Genocide & Juice, or ‘My Favorite Mutiny’ from 2006’s Pick a Bigger Weapon—and you'll get complex anti-corporate...

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 19, 2018 — “Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), the beleaguered bohemian-geek couple at the center of Private Life, have been trying, through fertility treatments, to get pregnant for years,” begins Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. Private Life “is a comedy of fragile hopes...

Jan 18, 2018 — The lineups for the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 15 through 25, are coming hard and fast now. Today sees rollouts for the Forum, the main attraction for many a cinephile, and the Berlinale Series. With descriptions...

Jan 17, 2018 — The Berlin International Film Festival has now completed the lineups for two of its programs, Forum Expanded and Generation. Back in December, the Berlinale announced a first round of Generation titles selected for younger viewers, so what we have today...

Jan 16, 2018 — Today we’re opening with an item that bumps New York from its usual top spot in these “goings on” roundups, because the first four titles lined up for this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week (February 14 through 22) have been announced:...

Jan 12, 2018 — The sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival is just over a month away now, running from February 15 through 25, and so far, we’ve seen first rounds of titles lined up for the Competition and the Panorama, Generation, and Shorts programs—as...

Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...

Jan 10, 2018 — Screenwriter Todd Alcott has a new book out, Kubrick: Five Films: An Analysis, the fourth volume in his series, What Does the Protagonist Want? In a series of nine posts at his site, he walks us through Barry Lyndon (1975),...