Desires

Nov 5, 2020 — Performances Whenever I think of the iconic Bengali actor Supriya Choudhury, the first thing I recall is not her face—with its high cheekbones and large, kohl-rimmed eyes that often drew comparisons to Sophia Loren’s—but her voice, disembodied, tearing through the...

Oct 30, 2020 — Channel Calendars With Thanksgiving around the corner, we’re grateful to the tireless preservationists who keep film history alive. Founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990, The Film Foundation has been an indispensable pillar of moving-image culture for the past three decades,...

Oct 28, 2020 — More than anything, Claudine felt like a reprieve; the film, directed by John Berry and released in 1974, gave audiences a compelling alternative depiction of Black life from those about Black drug lords and mafia dons fighting over real estate...

Oct 20, 2020 — At the start of The Gunfighter, Jimmy Ringo is a man with eleven kills to his name, soon to be twelve. But the only place he actually appears to be very violent, or even very vital, is in other people’s...

Sep 24, 2020 — Under the Influence Certain movies have such a profound impact on us in our formative years that they go on to resonate in unexpected ways throughout our lives. For Miranda July, one such film is Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape (1989), which...

Sep 1, 2020 — It’s not impossible to be a lazy, shrug-it-off filmmaker, just as it isn’t to be a lazy painter or novelist, or, more to the point, a lazy comic artist, drawing each picture merely once and then moving on. (You could...

Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda The poster for the seventy-second Cannes Film Festival, held in May 2019, used a photograph taken during the shooting of Agnès Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954. Wearing rolled-up trousers, a shirt,...

Jun 22, 2020 — Songbook At first it’s just one of many Fellini-esque dances: a band switches to an upbeat tune, Nino Rota’s “Caracalla’s (La Bersagliera),” and a previously dour party becomes an impromptu circle of ecstatic movement. Though overshadowed in La dolce vita...

Jun 9, 2020 — A couple walk down a cacophonous street in New York. They’re bundled in coats—wrapped up in their own worlds. She is incandescent with joy, talking about her cadre of close friends and their regular meetings. He wears a resigned face,...

May 26, 2020 — Richard Ford’s 1990 novel Wildlife begins with this arresting sentence: “In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love...