Into the Okavango

Jun 1, 2017 — “The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer,” writes Martin Scorsese in the new issue of the TLS. “They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but,...

Jun 1, 2017 — Earlier this spring, Ryuichi Sakamoto gave an exquisitely intimate concert at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Surrounded by a small audience in the venue’s opulent Veterans Room, the renowned Japanese composer was positioned in the center of the...

Jun 1, 2017 — Suffused with a quiet radiance, this Kazakh New Wave masterpiece grapples with cultural displacement through an allegorical tale of vengeance.

May 27, 2017 — “When French writer Delphine le Vigan published her book Based on a True Story in 2015, some critics dubbed it ‘a Hitchcockian novel,’” begins Jonathan Romney, writing for Screen. “It’s not surprising, then, that Roman Polanski’s adaptation is very Hitchcockian...

May 26, 2017 — Let’s take a quick break from the Cannes Film Festival to make note of a bit of reading we might take into the holiday weekend. There’ll be much more in a roundup to come, but for now, this entry will...

May 26, 2017 — “How on earth is she going to keep this up?” asks Little White Lies’ David Jenkins. “That’s the question, posed internally, that sprang to mind while watching the gently delightful debut feature Jeune femme [Montparnasse Bienvenue]. The ‘she’ is ambiguous...

May 25, 2017 — “The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has ever a heist gone quite so wrong to quite such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Bouncing wildly...

May 25, 2017 — “It’s baffling that Jacques Doillon’s Rodin was granted one of the main-competition slots,” writes Manohla Dargis in her latest dispatch from the Cannes Film Festival back to the New York Times. “A handsomely mounted waxworks, it might have made sense...

May 24, 2017 — “Sofia Coppola delivers a very enjoyable southern melodrama, the tale of a handsome, badly wounded Union soldier in enemy terrain during the American civil war who throws himself on the mercy of a ladies’ seminary—of all the outrageous things.” The...

May 24, 2017 — A piercing and perceptive film about the contemporary refugee experience in France, Jacques Audiard’s 2015 Palme d’Or winner Dheepan depicts the difficulties of living as a stranger in a strange land. In the film, a Tamil Tiger soldier (Antonythasan Jesuthasan)...