The Golden City

Jun 13, 2018 — Can a screenwriter influence—even change—the course of film history? With his script for Rashomon (1950), Shinobu Hashimoto, who turned 100 this year, did just that. The film launched its director—Akira Kurosawa—to world fame and brought international audiences to the glory...

Apr 9, 2018 — “Most famous for the exquisite 1979 family classic The Black Stallion, and, to a slightly lesser extent, 1996’s Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin-starring drama Far Away Home, [Carroll] Ballard is—despite making only six films in a period of almost forty...

Apr 5, 2018 — Locarno in Los Angeles, the series curated by Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk and co-artistic director Robert Koehler that brings a batch of the best films screened last summer at the increasingly vital Swiss festival, opens today and runs through...

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...

Mar 30, 2018 — New York. “Today’s manliest movie stars—mostly buffed-up superheroes like your Chrises Hemsworth, Pratt, and Evans—are scientifically enlarged and formed by state-of-the-art training and diet regimens,” writes Vern in the Village Voice. “Guys like Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and...

Mar 7, 2018 — The two big film festivals of April, one for each coast, have made major lineup announcements. The Tribeca Film Festival has rolled out all of its feature titles for its seventeenth edition, running from April 18 through 29. Last month,...

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Feb 22, 2018 — Luis Buñuel was born on this day, February 22, in 1900. “By 1961, Buñuel was born again, so to speak,” writes Jeremy Carr, having sketched the career from Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930) through the years in...

Feb 12, 2018 — Icelandic composer, musician, and producer Jóhann Jóhannsson is gone too early at the age of forty-eight. “Known for compositions that often blended electronics with classical orchestrations, Jóhannsson credits include the Golden Globe-winning score for 2015’s The Theory of Everything,” writes...

Feb 7, 2018 — Last week, the SXSW Film Festival presented 132 features lined up for its 2018 edition running from March 9 through 18. Today, the festival announces that Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs will be this year’s Closing Night Film—and it’s added...