The Text of Light

Dec 18, 2012 — One Scene Every time I watch Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, I am stunned that a film could be so full. Here is this thing stuffed with detail, design, behavior, emotion, surprise, and skill. Like Fanny and Alexander and...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...

Jul 19, 2016 — Time is both inescapable and irretrievable in Alain Resnais’s boldly disorienting masterpiece, which stars Delphine Seyrig as a widow haunted by her memories of World War II.

Jun 18, 2026 — Martin Scorsese, Agnès Varda, Lars von Trier, and Katharine Hepburn are just a few of the names you might be adding to your summer reading list.

Nov 24, 2025 — This month brings new collections from Melissa Anderson and A. S. Hamrah and a whole shelf of lives lived with the movies.

Sep 1, 2022 — Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel is met with a first round of qualified praise.

Sep 11, 2020 — As Toronto opens, here’s an overview of early critical response to some of the festival’s titles arriving directly from their premieres in Venice.

Sep 17, 2007 — I set out on my first trip to the Toronto Film Festival ready to feast on films and spend relaxed, indulgent, quality time with writers I work with, or hope to work with, as the editorial director here at Criterion....

Jul 15, 2025 — Much of the program upends assumptions about the postwar years as a period of relative calm and conformity.

Nov 26, 2018 — The Magnificent Ambersons In his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich published as This Is Orson Welles, Welles speaks nostalgically of the time he spent with his father in a tranquil enclave of 1920s Illinois, comparing it to “a childhood back in...