The Set-Up

Oct 21, 2019 — Songbook If you weren’t a devotee of the Cantopop world in the early 1990s, the casting of Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) may not have caught your attention. Starring in her first major role, the singer looked...

Oct 15, 2019 — Born in Denmark to a wealthy family in 1879, Benjamin Christensen dropped out of medical school to receive training as an opera singer, only to lose his singing voice to what was diagnosed as an incurable nervous illness. He then...

Feb 14, 2019 — Repertory Picks This Friday, critic Girish Shambu will present Aki Kaurismäki’s warmhearted fable Le Havre (2011) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. The first entry in an ongoing trilogy about the plight of refugees in twenty-first-century Europe, the film is set...

Feb 6, 2019 — On the Criterion edition of Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong describes his creative process as one of utter despair. That should come as no surprise to anyone who knows his work. Since making his feature debut, Green Fish, in 1997 at...

Dec 6, 2018 — Repertory Picks Since September, the Cinematheque at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has devoted its Sunday-afternoon screening series at the Chazen Museum of Art to the work of New German Cinema icon Rainer Werner Fassbinder. And this weekend, the retrospective’s second...

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Oct 16, 2018 — Seen as a light-hearted farce upon its release, this star-studded comedy by Hal Ashby stands as one of Hollywood’s most prescient portraits of post-Watergate politics.

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Jun 4, 2018 — Studio Visits New York–based painter and illustrator Riccardo Vecchio has made a name for himself with his evocative portraits and cityscapes. But for the last few years, he has returned to his Italian roots, devoting himself to depicting the Alpine mountains...

Sep 18, 2017 — 1. The first Newport Folk Festivals took place in 1959 and 1960 and were the result of a collaboration between Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein and Albert Grossman, who at the time were partners in music and artist management....