The First Year

Dec 12, 2017 — Before turning to the cities, we have a bit of festival news. The Locarno Festival, whose seventy-first edition will run from August 1 through 11, has announced that its “major Retrospective will be dedicated to three-time Oscar winner Leo McCarey...

Dec 12, 2017 — Alexander Payne skewers the absurdities of American politics in this tale of a high-school presidential campaign gone ugly.

Dec 11, 2017 — Over the weekend, the European Film Awards, the International Documentary Association’s IDA Awards, and the British Independent Film Awards were presented, and now, of course, we have the Golden Globe nominations. A good handful of critics’ organizations announced their picks...

Dec 8, 2017 — “We live in an age in which articles are written daily on the need for ‘checking out’ of online culture, so that we may disconnect from the bombardment of grotesqueries that keep us in an emotional tailspin,” writes Chuck Bowen,...

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Dec 7, 2017 — “I think that every movie gets better the second time around if you love it,” Guillermo del Toro tells Matt Zoller Seitz in an excerpt from a new book by Seitz and Simon Abrams, Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone....

Dec 6, 2017 — We’ve seen the features—all of them—and the lineups for the new Indie Episodic section as well as the Shorts and Special Events. Today, the Sundance Film Festival, whose 2018 edition runs from January 18 through 28, presents the lineup for...

Dec 6, 2017 — “There’s topical, there’s timely, and then there’s The Post, which feels less like a historical thriller set in 1971 than it does an exhilarating caricature of the year 2017,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “While Steven Spielberg’s latest film rivetingly...

Dec 5, 2017 — First, the bad news. “Every Frame a Painting is officially dead,” announce Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou. “Nothing sinister; we just decided to end it, rather than keep on making stuff.” As Catherine Grant, professor of Digital Media and Screen...

Dec 4, 2017 — One of the most anticipated highlights of lists and awards season is David Ehrlich’s spectacularly edited video countdown of his favorite films of the year. Today sees the 2017 edition that he’s been teasing on Twitter finally go live, and...