This Is Not a Film

Jan 6, 2021 — “Of the various insects that like to make their home in our houses, certainly the most interesting, for her beautiful shape, her curious manners, and her wonderful nest, is a certain Wasp called the Pelopaeus. She is very little known,...

Dec 1, 2020 — Near the end of the late Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee’s six-decade career in cinema, journalists liked to ask him one question quite frequently: Why did he never enter Bollywood?Depending on your vantage point, this query is either reasonable or ridiculous....

Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Oct 7, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 Spanning almost fifty years and four continents, Criterion’s recently released third collection of films restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project is a treasure trove of discoveries, each illuminated by a unique...

Oct 1, 2020 — Few directors capture bodies in motion with the sensuous intensity that Claire Denis brings to her work. In some of the most memorable scenes in her filmography, she invites viewers to linger in moments where her characters lose themselves in...

Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 The film world and ordinary people(s) in the four corners of the globe have long awaited the home-video release of Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun, 1970), the groundbreaking feature debut of one of Africa’s...

Sep 30, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 Pixote (1980), subtitled A lei do mais fraco (The Law of the Weakest), a hard-hitting tale of urban street children and their daily battle for survival in brutal conditions, was the Argentine-born Brazilian...

Sep 15, 2020 — When Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) first appeared on American screens, the critic Stephen Holden used a striking phrase to capture its embracing of bold opposites: “voluptuous austerity.” His characterization, widely quoted since, illuminates the film on many levels, and...

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.