The Story of Piera

Sep 29, 2017 — New York. The big event in town is, of course, the New York Film Festival, which gets going in earnest today following last night’s premiere of Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying. At the top of the NYFF 2017 Index, I’ve linked to an interview with festival director Kent...

Sep 26, 2017 — Let’s start today’s round with a few books. Next month sees the release of Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Dave Kehr’s followup to his 2011 book, When Movies Mattered. Before he became a curator in the...

Aug 29, 2017 — We’re “in dire need of revolutionary narratives,” writes Dan Hassler-Forest. And he grants that a few Hollywood blockbusters have made a stab at it, specifically calling out The Hunger Games, Rogue One, and Mad Max: Fury Road. “But Hollywood’s most...

Aug 24, 2017 — Cineaste has posted selections from its fiftieth anniversary issue, along with a round of web exclusives. Louis Menashe, professor emeritus at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and author of Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies, tells the...

Aug 12, 2017 — The International Jury of this year’s Locarno Festival, presided over by Olivier Assayas and including Jean-Stéphane Bron, Miguel Gomes, Christos Konstantakopoulos, and Birgit Minichmayr, has awarded the Golden Leopard to Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang—we’ve gathered reviews here. “I’ve been working...

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...

Aug 9, 2017 — New York. “Though Fire Island is the movie’s very recognizable locale, it is filmed in arcadianly remote aspects of sunlight, shade and water, and narrated simply on the solemn, picturesque, stark level of myth. . . . The world as...

Aug 7, 2017 — The Venice International Film Festival, whose seventy-fourth edition runs from August 30 through September 9, has not only revamped its site, it’s also added three films to its lineup. John Woo’s Manhunt will premiere Out of Competition. “A contemporary remake...

Jul 27, 2017 — Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbara has presented the lineup for the seventy-fourth edition (August 30 through September 9) at a press conference in Rome. I’ve gathered notes and trailers.CompetitionAi Weiwei’s Human Flow. From the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel:...

Jul 17, 2017 — “Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a...