The Documentary

Jul 21, 2017 — The Venice International Film Festival has announced that Rosita (1923), “famed as the single collaboration between two of the giants of the silent screen, the director Ernst Lubitsch and the star Mary Pickford, is the film that has been chosen...

May 25, 2017 — In Tuesday’s dispatch to the Village Voice from the Cannes Film Festival, Bilge Ebiri wrote about one of the best films he’d seen so far, The Rider, “directed by Chloé Zhao (whom I interviewed). It follows a young rodeo cowboy...

May 20, 2017 — “To fans of the mononymous Barbara—the delicate-voiced, emotionally acute French chanteuse adored by everyone from Jacques Brel to François Mitterand—Mathieu Amalric’s mega-meta, dreamily blurred biopic-within-a-film may seem a bemusing tribute to a national icon,” writes Guy Lodge at the top...

Feb 8, 2017 — In her award-winning 2016 film Cameraperson, documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson turns the spotlight on her own work and yet rarely appears on camera. Instead, we hear her voice off-screen, emerging intermittently throughout the film’s elliptical assemblage of outtakes, which are...

Oct 21, 2016 — Did You See This? The 2016 Gotham Award nominations were announced yesterday, and we were proud to see Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, a Janus Films release, in contention for best documentary. Writing on Claude Arnaud’s expansive new book, Jean Cocteau: A...

Jul 18, 2016 — Watch rare footage of the director candidly discussing his film’s production and afterlife, shot in 1983 by director-editor Timothy De Paepe, then a student of Harvey’s, as part of a film-school documentary

Feb 3, 2016 — For more than two decades, photographer Gregory Crewdson has been creating otherworldly images that reveal an eerie side of Americana. His works, typically tableaux of small-town life, transform the everyday into the uncanny.

May 22, 2015 — A music star burns brightly and flames out beautifully in Mark Rydell’s visceral rock-and-roll film, starring a sensational Bette Midler.

Apr 27, 2014 — A leading light of commedia all’italiana, Dino Risi specialized in fleet, satirical takes on contemporary Italian culture, and this road-trip smash was his most trenchant.

Sep 20, 2013 — Did You See This?• J. Hoberman revisits Shock Corridor. • Watercoloring the movies • Donald Richie to be honored • Time Bandits’ journey to the screen • Adam Curtis’s documentary attack • Howard Hampton slacks off. • Agnès Varda then...