The Long Darkness

Mar 1, 2022 — The first film I saw at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival opens on the image of a freshly dug grave. Shovelfuls of earth fall into the open pit as two doctors stand above it, lamenting the loss of yet...

Feb 22, 2021 — Labor films are not where one typically goes when seeking love and grace. They are more often concerned with bodies subjected to torsion and the furrowed brow of someone who knows the cupboards are growing bare. Then there are the...

Dec 3, 2019 — As the title card comes up, the movie has already begun, with a frontal view of a dilapidated plantation house, its ivied columns sporadically lit up by a raging storm. Spectators at the time of the film’s release who were...

Jan 22, 2019 — Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside...

Feb 15, 2018 — Think of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and pink pastels, purple uniforms, and the occasional splash of red may come to mind, offset by the ochres and faded wood grains of the scenes that frame the main story. Moonrise Kingdom...

Jan 26, 2018 — Death has been greedy this week, taking not only artists who have left their mark on cinema but others, too, who have made an impact on our culture overall. The week began with the passing on Monday of Ursula K....

Jan 24, 2018 — Wildlife, an adaptation of Richard Ford’s 1990 novel, “finds Paul Dano transporting his usual reserve as a performer (bellowing country preachers excepted) from one side of the camera to the other,” writes the A.V. Club’s A. A. Dowd. “Set in...

Sep 2, 2017 — “The names Joel and Ethan Coen pop up on a lot of screenplays these days (Bridge of Spies, Unbroken), now that they’re getting credit for the kind of script-polishing they used to do anonymously,” begins Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “But Suburbicon...

Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.

Feb 26, 2015 — The threat of death hangs over Watership Down, Martin Rosen’s wise and uncompromising animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel about rabbits on a survival mission.