Out of the Past

May 31, 2019 — Chinese poets and American and English novelists figure prominently in this week’s round.

May 28, 2019 — Songbook Some songs are so beautiful that it takes six or seven or fifty listens before you really hear the words. High on the list of the greatest American songwriters, Jerome Kern crafted many such melodies: perfect enough to momentarily...

Jul 18, 2018 — A new podcast from Trailers from Hell, three hours on Yojimbo, and more.

Jan 22, 2018 — Twenty-three titles have now been set for the Competition of the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival, and the Berlinale’s promising twenty-four. So while we await the mystery title, here are the five that have been added today, along with another...

Jan 6, 2018 — We begin this round on the best of 2017 with awards, because the National Society of Film Critics has just announced theirs. Forty-four of the Society’s fifty-nine members have cast ballots, and the majority of them are champions of Greta...

Dec 15, 2017 — The International Film Festival Rotterdam has been rolling out the lineup for its 2018 edition (January 24 through February 4) in quick spurts over the past few weeks, and it’s far from complete. But there’s already more than enough to...

Sep 29, 2017 — During this month’s Toronto International Film Festival, we began seeing reviews and interviews that would eventually make their way into the new issue of Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman’s conversation with Denis Côté about A Skin So Soft, for example, and...

Sep 17, 2017 — “Clio Barnard is the fiercely intelligent, visually inventive and innovative film-maker who gave us the brilliant docu-hybrid The Arbor and then The Selfish Giant, an inspired interpretation of Oscar Wilde set in Bradford,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Her third...

Sep 6, 2017 — When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at Sundance, I gathered a first round of reviews, beginning with Justin Chang’s for the Los Angeles Times: “Adapted from Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound sketches a vivid, dirt-under-the-nails panorama of 1940s Mississippi farm country, centered...

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...