beyond words

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

Jun 8, 2018 — San Francisco’s festival of experimental film prompts a new taxonomy from Michael Sicinski.

Jun 1, 2018 — The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is on through the weekend. Plus, Louise Brooks in the UK and Anna May Wong in Berlin.

May 24, 2018 — The late novelist’s work has proven to be an all but insurmountable challenge to screenwriters—but there’s hope.

May 23, 2018 — About halfway through Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (2016), Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) finds himself in a patch of woods in the middle of the night, crying. It’s a surprisingly vulnerable moment for a protagonist who is usually all business. We’re...

May 12, 2018 — The five-part essay film is “infused in equal measures by despair and aspiration.”

May 10, 2018 — The followup to Mrs. Fang is an oral history of China’s “Anti-Rightist Campaign” in the late 1950s.

Apr 19, 2018 — With a mix of improvisation, balletic physicality, and slapstick humor, Hollywood master Leo McCarey crafted the most sublime of screwball comedies.

Apr 17, 2018 — The past couple of days have seen lineup announcements from Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, and of course, last week, the main event, the Cannes Film Festival presented the bulk of its lineup for the seventy-first edition running from May...

Apr 3, 2018 — A little over a month ago now, we posted Marvel mon amour, a video by Daniel Raim in which Stan Lee looked back on working with his good friend Alain Resnais (above with Olga Georges-Picot in Cannes in 1968) on...