Diary

Jan 6, 2018 — We begin this round on the best of 2017 with awards, because the National Society of Film Critics has just announced theirs. Forty-four of the Society’s fifty-nine members have cast ballots, and the majority of them are champions of Greta...

Jan 1, 2018 — One of the most intriguing films we can look forward to in the new year is Claire Denis’s English-language debut, High Life. “I’ve always been interested in science, in astrophysics,” Denis told the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough in November. “But...

Dec 30, 2017 — Cinema lost a few giants this year, some soldiers, some heroes, duly heralded or not, and links from a good number of the names here will take you to collections of remembrances. I’ve also added notes and a few more...

Dec 20, 2017 — Eric Kohn introduces the results of IndieWire’s 2017 Critics Poll: “More than 200 critics and journalists from around the world participated in the eleventh edition of the poll, making it the largest international critics survey of its kind.” Jordan Peele’s...

Nov 28, 2017 — Ahead of the Christmas Day opening, preview screenings of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in New York and Los Angeles began over the weekend and will continue through Thursday. Variety’s Kristopher Tapley suggests that “if you define a film as...

Nov 16, 2017 — “Hong Sang-soo has a reputation for being a tricky interview, and he knows it,” writes Darren Hughes in the Notebook. But if anyone can get Hong talking, it’s Hughes. Take a look at this page. Gathered here are some of...

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 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...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Since I saw Faces Places at its premiere at Cannes in May, [Agnès] Varda’s latest documentary has cemented itself on my running list of the year’s best titles,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Made with the French...

Sep 21, 2017 — The editors of Senses of Cinema open Issue 84 with a “near exhaustive dossier” on Christian Petzold and a second entitled “Sartre at the Movies.” Here, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of French cinema, Dudley Andrew, explores the ideas...