The Witness

Jun 22, 2010 — In the autumn of 1989, the Iranian magazine Sorush printed a story about an unusual crime: a poor man had been arrested for impersonating a celebrated film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a middle-class family in northern Tehran. Although the accused,...

Jul 24, 2024 — The retrospective lays the groundwork for the release of a new restoration of Army of Shadows.

May 3, 2018 — Two of the earliest films to depict the bombing of Hiroshima show how politics shapes national mourning.

Oct 26, 2021 — In the run-up to Friday’s opening, Wright has put together a delectable issue of the Observer New Review.

Jan 26, 2021 — Larisa Shepitko was born in eastern Ukraine in 1938. Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, who left the family, fought in World War II. Her mother raised her and her two siblings on her own, and the moment Larisa...

Sep 3, 2019 — Early verdicts diverge as widely as opinions on how to respond to the very idea of a new film by Roman Polanski.

May 9, 2025 — Voices come in pairs this week: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao, Daney and Rivette, Patrick Bateman and his fans.

Aug 30, 2021 — An electrifying voice in American independent cinema, the filmmaker, artist, and DJ Ephraim Asili believes that moving images can revolutionize our perception of the world. His body of work attests to this conviction. Since he began making films more than...

Oct 20, 2020 — At the start of The Gunfighter, Jimmy Ringo is a man with eleven kills to his name, soon to be twelve. But the only place he actually appears to be very violent, or even very vital, is in other people’s...

Jul 6, 2020 — Songbook In the blue moonlight of a humid December night, an escape is underway. A man in army fatigues runs from an open-air cell with a rolled-up rug in one hand and a sword in the other, stolen from someone...