Like It Never Was Before

Oct 3, 2017 — In the print edition of the current issue of Film Comment, we find Luca Guadagnino saying that “the true generator of the movies I try to make is Jean Renoir, and A Day in the Country is really the alpha...

Sep 17, 2017 — Matteo Garrone’s gritty portrait of the Neapolitan Mafia draws on a lineage of Italian crime films dating back to Francesco Rosi’s trailblazing Salvatore Giuliano.

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...

May 19, 2017 — We’ll get to the film at hand in a moment, but first—and just briefly—there’s no getting around the controversy that’s all but dominated the first couple of days at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It began, really, when the festival...

Jun 22, 2015 — Terry Gilliam touches down in the real world for the first time with this fanciful tale of blurred class boundaries in New York City.

Feb 28, 2012 — In the long history of stage-to-screen translations, there’s never been anything quite like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an astonishing hybrid blurring the boundaries between theater and film, rehearsal and performance, actor and character. The production began in...

Nov 15, 2011 — “The day I can buy toilet paper in a Polish store, I’ll discuss politics,” Krzysztof Kieślowski told an interviewer in 1989, as he brushed aside a question. He was speaking at the Montreal Film Festival, where he was serving on...

Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...

Jul 25, 2011 — A fearless tragicomedy about hope, dread, longing, and forgiveness, Life During Wartime (2010) is Todd Solondz’s boldest and most haunting movie to date, carrying his exploration of Middle American malaise into new territory. As before, he probes the dreams, dissatisfactions,...

Mar 28, 2011 — Topsy-Turvy is both an anomaly among the films of Mike Leigh and, contrary as it may seem, a Rosetta stone. On the one hand, it is Leigh’s only costume picture and only biopic—a far cry from the bittersweet, realistic films...