The Night

Oct 28, 2017 — New York. “It’s an idea so good,” writes Farran Smith Nehme in the Village Voice, “you can’t believe no one did it before: a book about the deep and abiding friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart, true legends of...

Sep 29, 2017 — New York. The big event in town is, of course, the New York Film Festival, which gets going in earnest today following last night’s premiere of Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying. At the top of the NYFF 2017 Index, I’ve linked to an interview with festival director Kent...

Sep 19, 2016 — If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop.

May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.

Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.

Nov 8, 2011 — With the very first shots of Fanny and Alexander (1982), director Ingmar Bergman announces his perspective and signals his intentions. Here, we find the ten-year-old Alexander gazing into a puppet theater, lifting layer after layer of skillfully painted backdrop. We...

Feb 17, 2023 — Born and raised far from the centers of power in the movie industry, writer-director Glen Pitre began his career in the 1980s as a DIY filmmaker, showing his homemade productions to audiences in his native Louisiana. But when a powerful...

Dec 3, 1990 — Over the years I have had a recurrent nightmare in which I am summoned to a large, unfamiliar building in a middle-European satellite country (Bulgaria, perhaps) to tell the idea of Annie Hall to the Bulgarian Minister of Green Lights,...

Aug 2, 2017 — Dustin Guy Defa’s first feature, Bad Fever, was named one of the best films of 2012 by the New Yorker. His short films Person to Person and Family Nightmare premiered at Sundance and won awards at the Berlinale, SXSW, and...

Feb 21, 2024 — Combining the influence of the wuxia genre, the Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking of the 1980s, and loony comic-book futurism, these two ass-kicking fantasias are dazzling showcases of female physicality.