If I Were for Real

Aug 21, 2017 — When Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas fled Lithuania in 1944 only to land in a Nazi forced-labor camp, Jonas began to keep a diary. Entries from that diary are gathered in I Had Nowhere to Go, out now from...

May 22, 2017 — “At the risk of accidentally donating three words to the poster, How to Talk to Girls at Parties looks like it was phenomenally good fun to make,” grants the Telegraph’s Tim Robey. “An alien-sex-comedy-punk-musical-doodle set in 1977 Croydon, it packs...

Jan 21, 2009 — It’s a clichéd truism that moviemaking is a collaborative art. Of course it is, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of directors working time and again with the same crew members, trusted writers, cameramen, production designers, editors,...

Aug 13, 2018 — From Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers to Kazuo Hasegawa in An Actor’s Revenge, performers who multitask as several characters in a single film tap into the essential uncanniness of cinema itself.

May 29, 2026 — We’re revisiting work by Tarkovsky, Pelechian, and Portabella as well as two films with the word Dead in the title.

Feb 18, 2022 — This week we’re celebrating pioneers of queer cinema and reading about Melville, Menelik Shabazz, Patrick Wang, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Dec 9, 2023 — This week we’re revisiting the work of Tolkin, Bogdanovich, and Borowczyk and reading profiles of Isabelle Huppert and Nicolas Cage.

May 13, 2022 — The director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair reflects on the transformative power of a Sonic Youth needle drop in Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film.

Aug 18, 2023 — This week we’re revisiting After Hours and other ’80s greats and the oeuvres of Yasuzo Masumura and François Truffaut.