Song of Home

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Oct 30, 2020 — Channel Calendars With Thanksgiving around the corner, we’re grateful to the tireless preservationists who keep film history alive. Founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990, The Film Foundation has been an indispensable pillar of moving-image culture for the past three decades,...

Oct 30, 2020 — In his tension-filled, black-comic Oscar winner, Bong Joon Ho masterfully mixes tones and subverts genres in order to shine a harsh light on the mechanisms that maintain class inequality.

Feb 7, 2018 — Last week, the SXSW Film Festival presented 132 features lined up for its 2018 edition running from March 9 through 18. Today, the festival announces that Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs will be this year’s Closing Night Film—and it’s added...

Jan 8, 2018 — “If you were dream-casting the role of Golden Globes host for the season of #MeToo and #TimesUp, with black-clad attendees from TV series and films that confronted misogyny (The Handmaid’s Tale) and racism (Get Out) and a barnburner of a...

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 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.

Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.

Aug 31, 2011 — A man and a woman are married in a small town. The wedding procession follows them to a canal barge, of which he is the master. His crew, an old salt and a young boy, await them there. The couple...

Oct 18, 2009 —  So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...