The Passion of the Christ

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...

Nov 27, 2017 — On May 1, 2001, Dieter Kosslick took over as director of the Berlin International Film Festival, following Moritz de Hadeln, who’d held the job for twenty years. On May 31, 2019, the day after his seventy-first birthday, Kosslick’s current contract...

Oct 7, 2017 — “In just two adaptations,” begins Benedict Seal at Vague Visages, “author Brian Selznick has developed a reputation for inspiring intelligent and magical children’s films. After John Logan adapted The Invention of Hugo Cabaret for Martin Scorsese’s wonderful Hugo, Selznick has...

Jul 31, 2017 — Jeanne Moreau, who appeared in over 130 films over a period of sixty-five years and was declared “the greatest actress in the world” by none other than Orson Welles, has passed away in Paris at the age of eighty-nine. She...

Jul 27, 2017 — Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbara has presented the lineup for the seventy-fourth edition (August 30 through September 9) at a press conference in Rome. I’ve gathered notes and trailers.CompetitionAi Weiwei’s Human Flow. From the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel:...

May 16, 2011 — Among the most enduringly popular motives for murder, in films as in life, is the desire to remove an impediment to happiness—to get somebody, once and for all, out of the way. In life, of course, the goal of freeing...

Jul 19, 2010 — “Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?” A question followed by another question stands at the beating heart of The Red Shoes. It’s an entirely rhetorical exchange, but it underscores the power and the mystery...

Aug 14, 2006 — The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career are not Eric Rohmer’s first films. By 1963, he had made several shorts and one feature, Le signe du Lion. Yet these two short works—with their meticulously charted Paris locations; their semidocumentary...

Jul 17, 2000 — Designed to steam viewers’ glasses, Roger Vadim’s directorial debut boldly announced the arrival of Brigitte Bardot.

Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.