The Astronaut

Apr 4, 2018 — The sixty-first San Francisco International Film Festival opens tonight with Silas Howard’s A Kid Like Jake, and when it premiered at Sundance, IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called it “very much a ‘White People Problems’ movie, but it’s also a lot more...

Apr 2, 2018 — This week sees the openings of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Locarno in Los Angeles, and DOC10 in Chicago, and I’ll have separate entries on all three events in a couple of days. New York. The BAMcinématek series Tough...

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

Jul 14, 2009 — The decade-long Apollo program was the largest and most expensive undertaking in the history of man that wasn’t devoted to a war. During the four years between 1968 and 1972, there were nine manned flights to the moon. Twenty-four men...

Jul 31, 2017 — Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in...

Sep 16, 2019 — Martin Eden tops the Platform competition, while audiences go for Jojo Rabbit.

May 13, 2022 — It wasn’t always smooth going for Max Ophuls, Mike Hodges, or Irrfan Khan.

Feb 12, 2020 — If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of  the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. You grew up amid the reverberation of past earthquakes—all their...

May 28, 2018 — Alan Bean, one of twelve astronauts to leave their footprints on the moon, left us last weekend at the age of eighty-six.

Jul 16, 2019 — Armando Iannucci will open London, and Locarno and Venice are preparing their 2019 lineups