The Disco

Oct 21, 2019 — Songbook If you weren’t a devotee of the Cantopop world in the early 1990s, the casting of Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) may not have caught your attention. Starring in her first major role, the singer looked...

Apr 15, 2019 — It’s one thing to have wild cinematic ambitions, and quite another to pursue them without a strong technical skill set and years of apprenticeship in the craft. But from the beginning of his career, the twenty-nine-year-old, mostly self-taught filmmaker Bi...

Feb 6, 2019 — On the Criterion edition of Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong describes his creative process as one of utter despair. That should come as no surprise to anyone who knows his work. Since making his feature debut, Green Fish, in 1997 at...

Dec 9, 2018 — Songbook The final scene of Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville belongs to the transient wannabe singer Albuquerque, played by the late Barbara Harris. Up to that point, the storyline has followed numerous musician characters who are striving to get discovered or bolster...

Oct 2, 2018 — Performances There’s an irreducible reserve about Kristen Stewart, an appearance of not doing much on-screen, that I mistook for lack of talent when I first saw her mumbling into her shirt in the Twilight franchise. Still, playing Bella Swan, chastity...

May 31, 2018 — Back in 1977, when One Sings, the Other Doesn’t premiered at the New York Film Festival, Molly Haskell wrote that Agnès Varda’s radical feminist musical had done “for the spirit of sorority what the films of Renoir and Truffaut have done...

Feb 2, 2017 — Repertory Picks This Friday, the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Colorado, will screen Hal Ashby’s 1971 sophomore feature Harold and Maude. Made just one year after Ashby transitioned from editing to directing with his Brooklyn-set gentrification drama The Landlord, the...

Nov 30, 2016 — 1.Marlon Brando and his father founded Pennebaker, Inc., one of several companies in the 1950s that were started by leading actors and backed by a major studio. This business model became popular as the “Big Five” studio system began to...

Dec 14, 2015 — In the early 1960s, Agnès Varda traveled to Cuba to make the documentary Salut les Cubains (1963). Varda’s twenty-eight-minute film, composed almost entirely of photographs that captured Cuba’s vibrant postrevolutionary culture, was inspired by two of Chris Marker’s films—Varda took...

Nov 23, 2015 — Our new release of Dont Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker's groundbreaking behind-the-scenes portrait of Bob Dylan and his famed 1965 tour, is out tomorrow on DVD and Blu-ray and features a new interview with celebrated artist Patti Smith, a lifelong...