The Great Ambition

Mar 6, 2020 — Above photo: © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLCIn America, black musical genius has never been in short supply, though it hasn’t always been recognized or fairly compensated. Even a casual glance at the résumé of formally trained composer, producer, and arranger...

Apr 2, 2018 — Updates are still coming into the first entry on this year’s New Directors/New Films running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This entry will take us all the way through...

Mar 29, 2018 — New York. “Billed as a ‘meta-soap opera,’ Personal Problems is nothing less than an explosion of the television form,” begins Chuck Bowen at Slant. “Directed by Bill Gunn, the two-part, nearly three-hour miniseries was shot on video for a low...

Mar 14, 2018 — From today through March 30, the Quad Cinema in New York is presenting Pacino’s Way, a decades-spanning retrospective that will build up to screenings of two films Pacino’s directed, Wilde Salomé (2011) and Salomé (2013). “From 1971 to 1976,” writes...

Jan 23, 2018 — Made during the German occupation of France, these beguiling films showcase Claude Autant-Lara at the height of his powers.

Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...

Sep 1, 2017 — “There are any number of unforgettable images in Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, the most necessary and comprehensive documentary to date about our planet’s current refugee crisis,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “but the most indelible of them all is borrowed from...

May 21, 2017 — Tonight, Sunday, May 21, 2017, Twin Peaks returns, just as Laura Palmer (may have) predicted it would twenty-five years ago, give or take. Eighteen one-hour episodes, all directed by David Lynch and cowritten with the show’s original co-creator, Mark Frost....

Nov 7, 2005 — Often appearing on lists of the ten greatest films of all time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made, or the most masterful work of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu comes to us awash in superlatives. No less acclaimed has...