The Dead

Dec 11, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water leads the seventy-fifth Golden Globes nominations with a total of seven, followed by Steven Spielberg’s The Post and Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri with six each. As for television series, Big...

Nov 12, 2017 — On November 4, almost a month to the day after Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times on the accusations of sexual harassment and abuse leveled against Harvey Weinstein, Mark Harris tweeted: “Thing I've been hearing...

Nov 1, 2017 — “If you go to a single production this season, make it this one.” That’s Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic for the New York Times, enthusiastically recommending Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, an opera inspired by Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film and...

Oct 6, 2017 — Back when Projections was still called “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival described its program as a “yearly touchstone for experimental film.” Now neither of those terms—“avant-garde” and “experimental”—are quite broad enough to encompass all that goes...

Oct 5, 2017 — This is the documentary that put an end to Steven Spielberg’s plans to produce a narrative feature—to be directed by Sam Mendes—based on Gay Talese’s book, The Voyeur’s Motel. Spielberg had bought the rights after the New Yorker ran an...

Oct 3, 2017 — From Catherine Grant comes word that the third issue of Film Journal is now online, and it’s got a theme: “Since the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La...

Sep 28, 2017 — Let’s start today with a few interviews. I’ve opened the NYFF 2017 Index with a snippet from poet Peter Gizzi’s conversation with New York Film Festival director Kent Jones for BOMB, but I want to flag it again because they...

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...

Sep 6, 2017 — “Murray Lerner, a seminal music documentary filmmaker of the 60s and 70s, has died at age 90 in New York City,” reports Paula Parisi for Variety. “Lerner won an Oscar for best documentary in 1981 for From Mozart to Mao:...

Aug 30, 2017 — Paul Schrader’s First Reformed premieres in Competition in Venice before screening in the Masters program in Toronto, and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody finds it to be “a fierce film; Schrader, one of the crucial creators of the modern cinema...