The We and the I

Feb 2, 2017 — In her just-released Sundance hit The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczyńska evokes both the decadence and decrepitude of 1980s Poland through the adventures of Silver and Gold, two man-eating mermaid sisters who decide to go terrestrial and soon become a nightclub singing...

Jan 8, 2024 — The National Society of Film Critics and the Golden Globes have us surveying the latest round of best-of-2023 lists and overviews.

Oct 1, 2014 — In the hands of director Serge Bourguignon, a potentially sensationalistic story becomes a poetic and complex investigation of love and pain.

Jan 9, 2018 — Before we take another look back at the best (and today, the worst) of 2017, let’s note that, for Grasshopper Film, Radu Jude (Aferim!, Scarred Hearts) has listed, in chronological order, his eleven favorite films of the past ten years....

Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.

May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...

Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.

May 31, 1999 — In Abbas Kiarostami’s universe, it might be said, there are no things, only relations between things. Likewise, in his cinema: no films, only relations between films—and within them. And between them and us.Three and one. The most celebrated of Iran’s...

Aug 31, 2020 — Documentaries lead the charge this month on the Criterion Channel, with a wide-ranging offering of nonfiction films as formally imaginative and emotionally riveting as any scripted drama.

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.