† This is the Life

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

May 9, 2018 — 1. Born Arutin Sayadyan, eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova—whose pen name means “King of Songs”—served as the initial inspiration for The Color of Pomegranates. Sayat-Nova was an ashugh, a troubadour whose verses were set to music that he played on a...

Apr 18, 2018 — This morning, the Cannes Film Festival posted an announcement listing eleven new films that had been added to this year’s lineup. Then the announcement was yanked. Radio silence for hours. Now the announcement’s back up again. So let’s have a...

Apr 13, 2018 — “Miloš Forman, the anti-authoritarian director who left his native Czechoslovakia for creative freedom in the U.S. and captured Oscars for the masterpieces One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, has died.” Duane Byrge for the Hollywood Reporter: “Forman first...

Mar 15, 2018 — In what Tim Adams, profiling Tacita Dean for the Guardian, calls “an unprecedented collaboration” between “three of the nation’s most prestigious institutions,” two exhibitions are opening in London today—Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery and Still Life at the National...

Feb 28, 2018 — New York. Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema opens tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Sunday. Writing for the Notebook, Ela Bittencourt points out that “a number of films stand out for either their carefully...

Feb 18, 2018 — “Nymphetmania has a long and hoary pedigree in Hollywood, and flourished years before Nabokov gave us the Lolita syndrome,” writes Molly Haskell in the Guardian. “D. W. Griffith’s child-woman ingénues such as Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh were ‘pseudo-nymphets’ (critic...

Feb 12, 2018 — Before looking ahead to some of this week’s highlights city by city, we have some festival news to see to. The Venice International Film Festival has announced that Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) will preside over the International...

Jan 25, 2018 — Over a month ago now, we posted the first round in the ongoing series of lineup announcements from the Berlin International Film Festival, whose sixty-eighth edition runs from February 15 through 25. And that round revealed the first eleven titles...

Jan 24, 2018 — We begin with Rolling Stone’s David Fear: “Pick any random song by the Coup—we suggest ‘Fat Cats, Bigga Fish’ from their 1994 album Genocide & Juice, or ‘My Favorite Mutiny’ from 2006’s Pick a Bigger Weapon—and you'll get complex anti-corporate...