If I Were for Real

Jan 19, 2024 — We’ve been reading about Francis Ford Coppola, James Baldwin, Chantal Akerman, and Cary Grant and Randolph Scott’s barely kept secret.

Nov 22, 2023 — Quite an emotional range this week, from musicals and romantic comedies to the terror of nuclear war.

Oct 26, 2023 — Ever since he began working with the Miami-based film festival and collective Third Horizon in 2016, Jonathan Ali has been finding ways of celebrating Caribbean cinema and how it captures the irreducible complexity of the region and its diaspora. He...

Sep 29, 2023 — The week brings conversations with Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Christine Vachon, Pedro Costa, Wang Bing, and Rita Azevedo Gomes.

Apr 13, 2023 — Combining elements of soft-core porn and film noir, one of the most popular Hollywood genres of the 1980s and ’90s captured the fraught aspirationalism and sexual mores of the era.

Mar 28, 2023 — Described by director Joan Micklin Silver as “a kind of weird romantic comedy,” this defiantly ambiguous exploration of amour fou presents its obsessive antihero in all his contradictions.

Feb 28, 2023 — One of the towering figures of postwar French literature, Marguerite Duras was also an innovative filmmaker whose rarefied cinematic style dared audiences to see less and listen more.

Mar 15, 2022 — A captivatingly unclassifiable leading man in the 1980s, Hurt often returned to his first passion—the theater.

Dec 14, 2021 — Handsome volumes on Wes Anderson and David Fincher, a biography of Greta Garbo, and a memoir from Mel Brooks are among this month’s highlights.

Apr 7, 2021 — Songbook Zula knocks back two shots like they’re water, picks up a brimming martini glass, and struts right up to her current lover’s former lover—a poetess, at that—to introduce herself. “Bon soir,” says Zula, French still a little heavier on...