Best of the Best

Mar 27, 2018 — At the height of his career, Ken Russell brought D. H. Lawrence’s classic exploration of human sexuality to the screen with frank eroticism and visual panache.

Feb 8, 2018 — “Is there a full-length feature film in the dramatic but blink-and-it’s-over incident of three young Americans subduing a heavily armed terrorist determined to kill as many people as possible on a Paris-bound fast train two years ago?” asks the Hollywood...

Jan 24, 2018 — We begin with Rolling Stone’s David Fear: “Pick any random song by the Coup—we suggest ‘Fat Cats, Bigga Fish’ from their 1994 album Genocide & Juice, or ‘My Favorite Mutiny’ from 2006’s Pick a Bigger Weapon—and you'll get complex anti-corporate...

Jan 20, 2018 — “Twenty years ago,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Robin Williams approached director Gus Van Sant about developing irreverent Portland cartoonist John Callahan’s memoir, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, with the intention of playing its author—a quadriplegic skirt-chaser, wheelchair...

Dec 29, 2017 — We open a round of holiday listening and viewing with Bill Simmons and Sean Fennessey’s conversation (99’38”) at the Ringer with Paul Thomas Anderson about Phantom Thread, the few brief clashes he had with Burt Reynolds on the set of...

Dec 21, 2017 — New York. “One of the great films about childhood and life during wartime, Claude Berri’s piquant, piercing debut, The Two of Us (1967), also stands—despite its highly personal and historic milieu—as a study of a perennial generational conflict,” writes Alan...

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...

Nov 29, 2017 — The Sundance Film Festival, whose 2018 edition will run from January 18 through 28, has announced the lineups for its U.S. Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, and its Next, Spotlight, Premieres, Documentary Premieres, Midnight, and...

Nov 12, 2017 — In Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, Nancy Schoenberger “has hidden a provocative thesis,” suggests Stephen Metcalf, writing for the Atlantic. “She asks us to remember the beauty of masculine self-mastery as...

Oct 31, 2017 — New York. “Cinema began less as an art, more as a curiosity,” writes Tyler Maxin at Screen Slate. “Its early practitioners were hucksters, charlatans, and illusionists, and its direct predecessors were phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, vaudeville, and sideshows.” Tonight at Light...