American Movie

Dec 25, 2017 — New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama rolls on through January 7. “The genre of melodrama, which displays the grand, tragic passions that mark everyday lives while also detailing historical events that knock those...

Dec 23, 2017 — Let’s first take a quick break from 2017 and look back fifty years (as I suspect we’ll be doing a lot in 2018). For Little White Lies, Justine Smith has been rifling through various archives and has put together a...

Dec 22, 2017 — “There are two basic types of Errol Morris film,” writes Evan Kindley in the Nation: One is the character study of an obsessive individual pursuing a difficult, perhaps impossible goal. Morris loves his Ahabs: the animal-obsessed eccentrics of Fast, Cheap...

Dec 18, 2017 — When Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara with Jeanne Balibar premiered in the Un Certain Regard program of this year’s Cannes Film Festival in May, it won an award for Best Poetic Narrative. A month later, it won the Jean Vigo Award, and...

Dec 18, 2017 — The new Winter 2017 issue of Cineaste is out and the highlight of what’s online would have to be the interviews, four complete “Web Exclusives.” Dennis West and Joan M. West talk with documentarian Pamela Yates about completing her Guatemalan...

Dec 17, 2017 — “He’s joking all the time if he feels he has an audience,” Barbet Schroeder said of Idi Amin in a 1976 New York Post interview.I think we know the type.Ugandan dictator Amin, the subject of Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A...

Dec 14, 2017 — Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama is a sixty-two film series now running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York through January 7. “Sam Fuller famously defined cinema as ‘emotion,’ and just about every variety of it may be...

Dec 12, 2017 — “Grant Munro, a Winnipeg filmmaker whom the National Film Board calls a ‘Canadian film and animation legend,’ has died at the age of ninety-four,” reports Debra Yeo for the Toronto Star. Munro is probably best known for appearing in Norman...

Dec 10, 2017 — Awards season brings us not only lists and prizes but also roundtables. The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen’s recently led a conversation among seven directors: Darren Aronofsky (mother!), Sean Baker (The Florida Project), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit), Guillermo del Toro (The...

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...