Flesh and Fantasy

Dec 1, 2020 — Near the end of the late Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee’s six-decade career in cinema, journalists liked to ask him one question quite frequently: Why did he never enter Bollywood?Depending on your vantage point, this query is either reasonable or ridiculous....

Aug 3, 2017 — Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry are teaming up on a new edition of Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision. “First published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of Film Culture, it stands as the major theoretical statement...

Jun 17, 2015 — From a shrewd adaptation by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, Jonathan Demme fashions a visually inventive dreamscape out of an Ibsen classic.

Jan 13, 2025 — Toronto’s retrospective showcases an oeuvre that ranges from Fists in the Pocket (1965) to Kidnapped (2023).

Aug 22, 2023 — In 1962, the young Bo Widerberg threw a grenade into the complacent waters of Swedish cinema. It came in the form of four articles in the evening newspaper Expressen—followed by a book version titled Vision in 
Swedish Film—in which Widerberg...

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

Dec 16, 2021 — Whether their lists run to ten or fifty films, critics argue their cases for the films they’ve put on top.

Mar 5, 2021 — Here’s an overview of what critics have been saying about this year’s winners of the Berlinale’s top awards.

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Aug 18, 2020 — A sensuous exploration of amorous discontent and dreadful miscalculation, The Comfort of Strangers (1990) could be described as an erotic thriller, though it rarely is: its eroticism is too perverse, its pedigree too highbrow. Directed by Paul Schrader and based...