The Look

Mar 2, 2018 — New York. MoMA’s retrospective El Indio: The Films of Emilio Fernández is on through March 13. “With his longtime artistic comrade, the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, Fernández directed the movies that gave arthouse audiences worldwide their vision of post-colonial Mexico...

Jan 21, 2018 — “In a festival that rarely wants for political currency,” writes Justin Chang in a dispatch from Sundance to the Los Angeles Times, “it’s surely no coincidence that Blindspotting and Monsters and Men, the first two films to screen in this...

Jan 7, 2018 — The updates to the entry on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread are still rolling in, and one of the most recent ones links to Sheila O'Malley’s cover article for the new issue of Film Comment. “Unlike other clichéd Great Men...

Dec 20, 2017 — During the silent era, Hollywood’s approach to narrative structure was rapidly evolving. But while dramas were soon employing complex plot devices and lengthier running times, comedies lagged behind, focusing mainly on episodic slapstick. That changed when pioneers such as Charlie...

Sep 8, 2017 — “A complex and layered work, [Jonas Mekas’s] Lost Lost Lost [1976]—especially its first hour—is among cinema’s most poignant accounts of the immigrant experience,” writes Girish Shambu. “Historically, the best immigration cinema stages, in an astonishing multitude of ways, a divided...

Aug 3, 2017 — Mónica Delgado, José Sarmiento Hinojosa, and Ivonne Sheen of desistfilm recently “had a chance to enjoy lunch and a nice conversation with Austrian film maverick Peter Tscherkassky and American avant-garde filmmaker Eve Heller, one of the most talented couples in...

Aug 2, 2017 — “Forty years ago,” begins Earl Douglas at the Interrobang, “the country was still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, Elvis died, punk and disco took full flight, and New York City dealt with record heat, a blackout, a financial crisis and...

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...

Jul 11, 2017 — Let’s begin today with the listening and viewing tips, because New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis is Peter Labuza’s guest on The Cinephiliacs (85’38”). Among the topics discussed are “her childhood movie love of watching objects without inhibition and...

May 25, 2017 — “Leave it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, our favorite director of B movies that look like art films (or are they the other way around?), to upturn the nostalgia for American blockbusters of the 1980s,” begins Daniel Kasman in the Notebook. “Japan’s...