The Silence

Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...

Jan 30, 2018 — In his first sound film, silent-era master G. W. Pabst captures both the familial camaraderie and everyday brutality of life in the trenches.

Jan 22, 2018 — “In The Tale, an early critical favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and a drama of uncommonly troubling power, Laura Dern plays Jennifer Fox, a documentary filmmaker trying to remember an experience that befell her at the age of...

Jan 18, 2018 — The lineups for the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 15 through 25, are coming hard and fast now. Today sees rollouts for the Forum, the main attraction for many a cinephile, and the Berlinale Series. With descriptions...

Dec 30, 2017 — Cinema lost a few giants this year, some soldiers, some heroes, duly heralded or not, and links from a good number of the names here will take you to collections of remembrances. I’ve also added notes and a few more...

Dec 6, 2017 — “There’s topical, there’s timely, and then there’s The Post, which feels less like a historical thriller set in 1971 than it does an exhilarating caricature of the year 2017,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “While Steven Spielberg’s latest film rivetingly...

Oct 6, 2017 — Kevin Jerome Everson has a nine-minute short screening as part of Projections’ Program 1: Speculative Spaces at the New York Film Festival. In IFO, “which stands for ‘Identified Flying Object,’ African Americans look up at the skies and report alien...

Aug 30, 2017 — “You could argue that [Janicza Bravo’s] Lemon thinks too much about its own face, its style over its substance,” writes Niela Orr for the Baffler, “but it does so in service of its critique of white male narcissism. To this...

Aug 29, 2017 — We’re “in dire need of revolutionary narratives,” writes Dan Hassler-Forest. And he grants that a few Hollywood blockbusters have made a stab at it, specifically calling out The Hunger Games, Rogue One, and Mad Max: Fury Road. “But Hollywood’s most...

Aug 11, 2017 — “Mrs. Fang is a study of a face and a sober essay on death,” writes Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. “It’s also about fishing. As profoundly moving as it is troubling, this new masterwork from documentary filmmaker Wang Bing...