First Love

Jan 9, 2019 — There’s a certain tall-tale quality to Sandi Tan’s life. When the California-based filmmaker was growing up in Singapore in the 1980s and ’90s, movies were a powerful way of experiencing the world beyond her small native country, a place she...

Dec 19, 2018 — The star of one of the biggest sitcoms in the 1970s directed three major hit films in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

Dec 17, 2018 — Also, directors discuss their craft, and critics carry on listing the best films of 2018.

Dec 14, 2018 — “It’s sad to say, but women do not have much importance in westerns,” observed Anthony Mann, a master of the genre, in a 1957 Cahiers du cinéma interview. Made that same year, Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns begins with a whopper...

Dec 12, 2018 — Selection to the registry ensures that “these films will be preserved for all time.”

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Dec 3, 2018 — Yorgos Lanthimos’s period romp wins a record ten British Independent Film Awards, and John Waters picks his ten favorite films of 2018.

Nov 29, 2018 — 112 films, including new work from Joanna Hogg, Stanley Nelson, Kim Longinotto, and Ritesh Batra.

Nov 28, 2018 — The career of one of Italy’s greatest directors was riddled with scandal and accolades.