The Past

Dec 10, 2024 — In this brilliant adaptation, Joel and Ethan Coen find a kindred spirit in novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose abiding themes—including destiny, the American West, and the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct—mirror their own.

May 7, 2024 — This year’s edition features work by Michel Khleifi, Antoinetta Angelidi, Amit Dutta, Raúl Ruiz, and Tsai Ming-liang.

Jan 31, 2024 — Shifting recklessly between realism and surrealism, this drug-fueled odyssey from director Danny Boyle is a propulsive satire of depleted masculinity in urban Scotland.

May 11, 2020 — This week’s round comes loaded with lists: 100 novels about cinema, fifty novelizations, and dozens of Sheila O’Malley’s favorite biographies.

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Aug 21, 2019 — One Scene One of my absolute favorite quotes from Douglas Sirk—and he has a million of ’em—was made in reference to Magnificent Obsession. “It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness,” he said (this isn’t the quote quite...

Apr 5, 2018 — Variety’s Elsa Keslassy broke the story yesterday, and now the Cannes Film Festival has confirmed it: Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows with Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem will open the seventy-first edition on May 8. Shot “in Spanish on the Iberian...

Jan 23, 2018 — “It’s not every day that you witness a new cinematic language being born, but watching RaMell Ross’s evocatively titled documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening qualifies,” argues Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “The director, a photographer and teacher...

Jan 22, 2018 — Twenty-three titles have now been set for the Competition of the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival, and the Berlinale’s promising twenty-four. So while we await the mystery title, here are the five that have been added today, along with another...

Dec 4, 2017 — Last Wednesday, the Sundance Film Festival unleashed the entire features lineup for its 2018 edition, running from January 18 through 28. Today, the festival’s adding lineups for a new Indie Episodic section as well as its Shorts and Special Events...