The Return

May 4, 2018 — What do we mean when we say a narrative film is poetic? The answer lies in this visionary western from director Jim Jarmusch.

Mar 14, 2018 — “How could I have written a longish book on 1940s Hollywood and have devoted so little space to Casablanca?” asks David Bordwell. The book is Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, and “I suppose I neglected Warners’ evergreen...

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...

Jan 29, 2018 — New York. The Metrograph’s “essential series Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories gets its title from a 1980 documentary by Chantal Akerman called Dis-Moi, which is one of the earliest filmed works of oral history about the Holocaust,” writes Richard...

Jan 2, 2018 — New York. “Starting in the mid-1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni became what the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger would call a ‘tourist of the revolution,’” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times. “Antonioni left Italy to make Blow-Up (1966) in swinging...

Dec 18, 2017 — On Friday, we saw the first round of titles slated for the Panorama section of the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival (February 15 through 25). Today, the Berlinale’s revealed the first ten titles lined up for the Competition. Laura Bispuri’s...

Dec 8, 2017 — “We live in an age in which articles are written daily on the need for ‘checking out’ of online culture, so that we may disconnect from the bombardment of grotesqueries that keep us in an emotional tailspin,” writes Chuck Bowen,...

Nov 27, 2017 — New York. For the Village Voice, Leo Goldsmith surveys the Film Society of Lincoln Center series The Non-Actor, running now through December 10: “Drawing together nearly three dozen films, the program traces a fascinating lineage of amateur performance across history,...

Nov 13, 2017 — New York. “Largely terra incognita, West German cinema before Fassbinder was distinguished by films made by returning exiles, Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, as well as a number of strong, critical movies, some of them international hits, by Helmut Käutner, who began his career under...

Nov 1, 2017 — “If you go to a single production this season, make it this one.” That’s Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic for the New York Times, enthusiastically recommending Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, an opera inspired by Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film and...