Extraordinary Stories

Jun 16, 2017 — Robert Kolker “is best known for his landmark study A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman (1980), now in its fourth edition, as is his influential textbook, Film Form and Culture (1999),” writes Jonathan Kirshner for the Boston...

Jun 14, 2017 — New York’s BAMcinemaFest opens tonight with Aaron Katz’s Gemini and closes on June 24 with Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits. “Now celebrating its ninth year, this modest yet prestigious festival, so shrewdly curated, so reliably comprehensive a treasury of contemporary...

Jun 7, 2017 — Japanese New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda discusses how Kenji Mizoguchi seamlessly weaves together harsh realism and spellbinding fantasy in his masterpiece Ugetsu.

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...

May 18, 2017 — “Todd Haynes’s films, intellectually rigorous and often profoundly moving, are fractured stories in which alienated, beautiful characters try to find love (or a certain likeness) in the delicate folds of real life,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “All of this...

Apr 21, 2017 — George Stevens’s Oscar-winning comedy captures the first sparks of attraction that ignited one of the great on- and offscreen romances in Hollywood history.

Mar 28, 2017 — In his first English-language feature, Michelangelo Antonioni examines the elusiveness of the real through the lens of a murder mystery.

Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.

Dec 6, 2016 — Photo by Janet Pierson In the late eighties and early nineties, American independent film was coming into its own both artistically and commercially, and John Pierson was at the center of the movement. Once described by the New York Times...

Nov 22, 2016 — The result of a notoriously troubled production, Marlon Brando’s unorthodox western presents a brooding vision of human futility.