This Happy Life

May 18, 2020 — The beloved stalwart of the Seattle filmmaking community and accomplished director of high-profile television series was only fifty-four.

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

Feb 27, 2018 — “Orson Welles, a boy from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was one of the most audacious Shakespearians who ever lived,” writes Robert Horton. “He recited soliloquies as a child, wrote a book on the plays as a teenager, and at age seventeen roamed...

Jan 7, 2018 — This past Christmas Eve, Jonas Mekas—filmmaker, poet, critic, co-founder of the journal Film Culture and New York’s Anthology Film Archives—turned ninety-five, certainly occasion enough for IndieWire’s Eric Kohn to get a few words with him. They discuss government support for...

Nov 29, 2017 — The National Board of Review, established in 1909 and now boasting over 100 members, has named Steven Spielberg’s The Post as the best film of 2017. The Post won’t open until December 22 and reviews are embargoed until this coming...

Nov 21, 2017 — Ernst Lubitsch’s “world is defined by time as much as place,” writes Daniel Witkin in the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time. “Anachronistically straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, his characters embody unfashionable virtues of discretion and tact...

Sep 5, 2017 — “If the only thing we wanted, or expected, a horror film to do was to get a rise out of you—to make your eyes widen and your jaw drop, to leave you in breathless chortling spasms of WTF disbelief—then Darren...

Apr 27, 2017 — 1. As I began work on The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates, I knew that 1960’s Primary was really the birth of what we think of as the modern documentary: observational photography based on access to an interesting subject, presenting...

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.