Chihayafuru: Part I

Dec 15, 2017 — The International Film Festival Rotterdam has been rolling out the lineup for its 2018 edition (January 24 through February 4) in quick spurts over the past few weeks, and it’s far from complete. But there’s already more than enough to...

Oct 7, 2017 — We begin with Angelo Muredda, writing for Cinema Scope: “Joachim Trier makes a sterling if somewhat noncommittal bid for post-horror with Thelma, a slow-burn supernatural thriller about a Norwegian teen (Eili Harboe) who goes away to college (and away from...

Oct 6, 2017 — “In both shape and sensibility, the work of Los Angeles-based filmmaker Ben Russell embodies a fluid yet holistic creative practice,” writes Jordan Cronk, introducing his interview for Film Comment. “A spiritual descendant of cinematic anthropologists Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner,...

Sep 6, 2017 — New York. Back in April, Film Forum presented The Complete Wiseman: Part 1: Early Wiseman, the first half of a Frederick Wiseman retrospective that, as Matt Prigge notes in the Village Voice, “covered the prolific and pioneering documentarian’s angriest period.”...

Jul 25, 2017 — “So,” wrote Chris Marker in 2003, looking back on his school days, “with scissors, glue and crystal paper, I made a faithful copy of the actual Pathéorama reel. After that, frame by frame, I began to draw a series 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...

Oct 18, 2016 — Guillermo del Toro’s anti–Wizard of Oz refracts the surreal traumas of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of a young girl.

Aug 24, 2016 — During a 2006 meeting with the author, French New Wave icon Jeanne Moreau reminisced about working with Orson Welles, Louis Malle, and François Truffaut, and her turn to acting as a means of eluding the “destiny of a regular girl.”

Apr 12, 2016 — Howard Hawks’s 1939 aviation classic Only Angels Have Wings is an exemplar of the auteurist Hollywood entertainer’s capability to fuse “a personal existential statement and a delightful piece of showmanship.”

May 11, 2015 — The poignancy of Leo McCarey's tearjerker is due as much to the director's scrupulous aesthetic choices as his unforgettable characters and story.