See You Up There

Apr 5, 2018 — “Isao Takahata, who co-founded Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, has died at eighty-two, according to Yahoo! Japan.” Michael Nordine for IndieWire: “Takahata was a revered director in his own right, helming such animated classics as Grave of the...

Apr 5, 2018 — “Just a few years in and DOC10 is already a must-hit stop on the festival circuit for the year’s best documentaries,” writes Lisa Trifone in the Third Coast Review. “The brainchild of Chicago Media Project and head programmer Anthony Kaufman,...

Mar 22, 2018 — New York. There’s a series currently running at the Metrograph through Monday with a very long title. Ready? Something About Stray Dogs: Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs and a Kurosawa Retrospective. The films have been hand-picked by Anderson, who says,...

Mar 15, 2018 — In what Tim Adams, profiling Tacita Dean for the Guardian, calls “an unprecedented collaboration” between “three of the nation’s most prestigious institutions,” two exhibitions are opening in London today—Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery and Still Life at the National...

Mar 12, 2018 — When the SXSW Film Festival presented the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One last night, “technical difficulties KO’ed the sound for the second time in a row, bringing the dizzying, VFX-fueled video game adventure to a grinding halt...

Mar 7, 2018 — A Wrinkle in Time, the adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 science fiction classic, “directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, has been a long time coming,” writes A. O. Scott in the New York...

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Mar 1, 2018 — This year’s edition of the True/False Film Fest opens today in Columbia, Missouri and runs through Sunday. “The festival focuses on nonfiction films, though True/False’s definition of the term is intentionally porous,” writes Aarik Danielsen during the course of his...

Feb 26, 2018 — The new Spring 2018 of Cineaste is out, and online, we find just a few previews of what’s inside, but a whole lot of web exclusives. “The Nixon presidency? Suddenly, it seems almost quaint,” writes Jonathan Kirshner. “But it was...

Feb 16, 2018 — “The responsibility of being a gay film critic,” writes Michael Koresky, “to borrow a phrase from the great Robin Wood, is to be honest about your responses as an individualized viewer, and to balance questions around identity with a film’s...