The River Line

Mar 11, 2022 — Deep Dives There’s an entire realm of children’s entertainment that survives mostly on the margins of collective consciousness. The average person is unlikely to know Michael Sporn’s name, but if they are of a certain age, they almost certainly have...

Jan 1, 2022 — Ring in the new year with the French New Wave, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and a look back at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Sep 18, 2025 — No movie star was bigger in the 1970s, and he won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People. But Sundance may be his most impactful legacy.

Jun 5, 2023 — The director of one of the major early works of the French New Wave lived to see interest in his work revived.

Nov 15, 2019 — It’s a strange feeling: adoring cinema while at the same time always sensing that it’s not made for you. This is how I felt growing up, at least. I came of age watching movies, crushing on them so hard that...

Jun 1, 2016 — With Wrong Move, Wim Wenders made “a movie about the impossibility of moviemaking, a road movie about the uselessness of travel, a literary film about the impossibility of communication.”

Oct 7, 2019 — Critics respond to the New York Film Festival’s selection of new moving image art.

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Aug 11, 2016 — Gus Van Sant’s groundbreaking 1991 work of New Queer Cinema, which follows the relationship between a narcoleptic haunted by feverish dreams of his past and the rebellious son of a mayor, is showing at the George Eastman Museum.

Apr 25, 2022 — During a precarious time for film exhibition, Inney Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, had an idea to rethink the bounds of nonfiction cinema. He ended up conceiving Prismatic Ground, a festival that launched...