The Way of the World

Oct 3, 2017 — In the print edition of the current issue of Film Comment, we find Luca Guadagnino saying that “the true generator of the movies I try to make is Jean Renoir, and A Day in the Country is really the alpha...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Noah Baumbach has always been a writer-director of no formal distinction, but he's possessed with a keen eye and ear for the intricacies of pettiness, humiliation, and schadenfreude,” begins Steve Macfarlane at Slant. “His new film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Since I saw Faces Places at its premiere at Cannes in May, [Agnès] Varda’s latest documentary has cemented itself on my running list of the year’s best titles,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Made with the French...

Sep 27, 2017 — In conjunction with a new edition of Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, we’re sharing a selection from the opening pages of this seminal work.

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...

Sep 6, 2017 — When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at Sundance, I gathered a first round of reviews, beginning with Justin Chang’s for the Los Angeles Times: “Adapted from Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound sketches a vivid, dirt-under-the-nails panorama of 1940s Mississippi farm country, centered...

Sep 2, 2017 — Remembering Jerry Lewis in a piece for the Guardian, Martin Scorsese recalls working with him on King of Comedy: “Jerry Langford was an uncomfortable role for him to play, because he was skirting the edges of his own life in...

Sep 1, 2017 — “A single slur becomes the lightning rod for a court case that grips but also bitterly divides a nation in The Insult, the latest feature from Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri (The Attack),” begins Boyd van Hoeij in the Hollywood Reporter....

Aug 30, 2017 — “Can there be any clearer signal of reality warping as we hurtle toward imminent apocalypse than the fact that Alexander Payne has made a life-affirming film?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Venice opener Downsizing takes the long road getting...

Jul 15, 2017 — “The film’s tag line was ‘They share the same body . . . but hate each other’s guts!’ I was told that the timing was a coincidence, but even before the film began it was clear that this was a...