The Beautiful Story

May 13, 2019 — Whether he was adapting Lillian Hellman or Stan Lee, Sargent excelled at locating the human heart beating at the center of the story.

Apr 23, 2019 — Elia Kazan can be and has been called many things: a cinematic genius, an actor’s director, a womanizer, a government stoolie, an uncompromising artist and three-time Academy Award winner. But whatever your opinion of his personality, his temperament, or his...

Oct 14, 2018 — If horror is going to be forever plagued by remakes and sequels, we could do worse than this year’s Halloween and Suspiria.

Aug 21, 2018 — A mythic piece of early Finnish cinema gets reimagined in the short film The Moonshiners, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Jul 19, 2018 — Damien Chazelle’s First Man will open Venice, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will be the NYFF’s Centerpiece presentation.

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

May 9, 2018 — In this followup to Embrace of the Serpent, a mob story is interwoven with Wayúu Native American rituals.

May 1, 2018 — Working within the strict rules and tight budget of a commissioned television project, one of France’s finest contemporary directors made an artistic breakthrough that would go on to define his career.

Apr 13, 2018 — Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov explored his Transcaucasian roots in this visually spectacular and wonderfully strange ode to the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova.