The First Year

Aug 19, 2024 — Two Lithuanian directors score top awards, while Invention emerges as a critical favorite.

May 16, 2023 — Inspired by golden-age monster movies and the story of a real-life mass murderer, Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature evokes the psychic dread of America in the 1960s, a decade defined by long-distance and increasingly high-profile gun violence.

Aug 16, 2022 — The Safdie brothers drew inspiration from their childhood memories for their first feature as codirectors, a terrifying yet wondrous portrait of an unpredictable father.

Nov 11, 2020 — Claire Denis When Robert Pattinson tested positive for COVID-19 in September, Warner Bros. shut down the production of Matt Reeves’s The Batman for a couple of months. Shooting has since resumed, but Claire Denis’s schedule has been thrown off. She’d...

Jul 27, 2020 — The first shot of Atom Egoyan’s 1984 debut feature, Next of Kin, is a ground-level pan across the baggage claim section at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The camera is angled so that our gaze is on the various pieces of luggage...

Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...

Aug 15, 2019 — A stylish and sensitive storyteller with a powerfully romantic vision, Frank Borzage was one of the great filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age, making more than a hundred movies, in a wide array of genres, over the course of a nearly...

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Jan 26, 2018 — New York. Tomorrow, to celebrate the republication of Stan Brakhage’s book Metaphors on Vision (1963), the Metrograph and Light Industry cofounders Ed Halter and Thomas Beard will present a 16 mm print of his 1957 short Daybreak & Whiteye—and a...

Jan 9, 2018 — Before we take another look back at the best (and today, the worst) of 2017, let’s note that, for Grasshopper Film, Radu Jude (Aferim!, Scarred Hearts) has listed, in chronological order, his eleven favorite films of the past ten years....