The Blue Star

Sep 25, 2020 — This week there’s a new Film Quarterly and a new frieze and fresh conversations with Jan Oxenberg and Paul Cronin.

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...

Jun 5, 2023 — The director of one of the major early works of the French New Wave lived to see interest in his work revived.

Feb 19, 2025 — Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke reteam to prove once again that few can make talk livelier or more engaging.

Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...

Jan 21, 2025 — Lynchian may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

Aug 28, 1995 — Three Cases of Murder is of most interest to American audiences for Orson Welles’s flamboyant and bravura performance as Lord Mountdrago. However, it’s equally important as a showcase for Wendy Toye, one of Britain’s first female directors, and star Alan...

Jun 2, 2016 — Kings of the Road is the most “roadish” of Wenders’s road movies, a film about travel as a form of escape for two German men and the transitory bond they form along the way.

Jan 22, 2025 — New films by Richard Linklater, Bong Joon Ho, Radu Jude, and Lucile Hadžihalilović are set for the seventy-fifth edition.