Begin Again

Oct 8, 2017 — Lady Bird screens at the New York Film Festival this evening and tomorrow night, and we begin with Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay: “Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with this controlled, coolly compassionate and autobiographical-feeling post-9/11 teenage tale. Saoirse Ronan plays...

Oct 6, 2017 — Back when Projections was still called “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival described its program as a “yearly touchstone for experimental film.” Now neither of those terms—“avant-garde” and “experimental”—are quite broad enough to encompass all that goes...

Oct 4, 2017 — We begin with Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker about Alain Gomis’s Félicité, “a dramatic portrait of a fierce, intrepid woman—a single mother and a powerfully expressive cabaret singer (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) in Kinshasa who is wrenched from...

Oct 3, 2017 — “American Gods star Pablo Schreiber will play astronaut Jim Lovell in Damien Chazelle’s moon-mission movie First Man,” reports Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro. In March, D’Alessandro noted that the story, based on James R. Hansen’s 2005 book, “follows NASA’s mission to land...

Sep 28, 2017 — Let’s start today with a few interviews. I’ve opened the NYFF 2017 Index with a snippet from poet Peter Gizzi’s conversation with New York Film Festival director Kent Jones for BOMB, but I want to flag it again because they...

Sep 5, 2017 — Frederick Wiseman “is 87 now,” as Tom Charity notes in the new issue of Cinema Scope. “It may be a little presumptuous to suggest he’s reaching for a summation, but it is sure that he’s only making the films he...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...

Aug 15, 2017 — Walter Matthau solidified his reputation as a formidable comedic force in this delightful Cold War espionage romp.

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...

Aug 11, 2017 — With his controversial new film Nocturama opening in theaters, French director Bertrand Bonello spoke with us about what inspires him as an artist and how he blurs the line between realism and abstraction.