Center Stage

Sep 18, 2020 — The late scholar Robert Bird’s final essay on Tarkovsky and fresh writing on Béla Tarr, Eric Rohmer, and more are among this week’s highlights.

Sep 11, 2020 — As Toronto opens, here’s an overview of early critical response to some of the festival’s titles arriving directly from their premieres in Venice.

Aug 21, 2020 — A free film school in a French banlieue, a nineteenth-century inventor, and a lesbian classic are among this week’s highlights.

Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...

Jun 22, 2020 — Heartfelt tributes to the great British actor have been appearing since he passed away on Friday.

Jun 15, 2020 — The hugely popular and prolific Italian actor Alberto Sordi relished playing rogues, characters riddled with foibles and weaknesses. In an interview with Positif’s Jean A. Gili in 1999, he revealed that his aim was to depict in a comic register...

May 22, 2020 — The Times of Harvey Milk Today—May 22, 2020—would have been Harvey Milk’s ninetieth birthday. Harvey was forty-five when I first met him in his camera store; I was nineteen. Harvey was murdered when he was just forty-eight, and I’m now...

May 21, 2020 — Deep Dives “Right then, get dressed!” my mother sang out once a year when I was a child. “We’re going down the Lane,” and I was at the front door with my coat on before she was. The Lane was...

May 8, 2020 — The opening and closing credits in a film are a form of housekeeping, fulfilling a legal obligation to compile the names of cast and crew who made the final product possible. Visionary designer Saul Bass saw the aesthetic potential in...

Apr 16, 2020 — Performances If Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-sixth president, continues to inspire a morbid fascination in some of us, the reasons for this extend beyond the obviously exceptional aspects of his career—his reelection in 1972, one of the largest landslide victories...