The Music Man

Jun 22, 2021 — This month’s roundup of new and noteworthy titles opens with “a counterfactual history of the movies.”

Jun 21, 2021 — The New York festival has presented its awards, premiered a star-studded heist movie, and thrown a party.

Jan 20, 2018 — On what would have been Saul Turell’s ninety-seventh birthday, Peter Cowie celebrates the man who was the beating heart behind Janus Films.

Aug 21, 2024 — This month brings a new biography of Agnès Varda, collections from Phillip Lopate and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and some hefty coffee-table accessories.

Mar 18, 2022 — With a collection of her films now available on the Criterion Channel, the director behind Still Processing discusses the radically personal nature of her work.

Jan 20, 2018 — We begin with April Wolfe, writing for Film Comment and introducing us to Maxim Pozdorovkin and Our New President, which “tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, constructed almost...

Dec 12, 2017 — On the new episode of the Supporting Characters podcast (123’49”), Bill Ackerman talks with author and film critic Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies and, most recently, Steven Spielberg: A Life...

Jul 25, 2011 — A fearless tragicomedy about hope, dread, longing, and forgiveness, Life During Wartime (2010) is Todd Solondz’s boldest and most haunting movie to date, carrying his exploration of Middle American malaise into new territory. As before, he probes the dreams, dissatisfactions,...

May 15, 2000 — In René Clair’s ebullient early talkie, an unsentimental love of humanity permeates every frame.

Feb 19, 2026 — In more than forty nonfiction features, he tried, as he said, “to create dramatic structures out of ordinary experience.”