Keep Real

Oct 15, 2020 — A quick survey of projects in the works coming from Ava DuVernay, Steven Soderbergh, Park Chan-wook, Clint Eastwood, and Ridley Scott.

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...

Sep 29, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 What can it mean for cinema to be revolutionary? Answering a version of this question in a 1977 interview, the Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solás stressed the importance of real-world context. In a capitalist...

Sep 22, 2020 — Francesco Rosi’s film Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) is based on Carlo Levi’s novelistic memoir of the same name, which became an instant classic of Italian literature when it appeared at the end of World War II, in 1945. In...

Aug 31, 2020 — “Movies show us ourselves as we had not yet learned to recognize us—something in the nature of daily being or happening that quickly gets folded over into ancient history like yesterday’s newspaper, but in so doing a new face has...

Aug 20, 2020 — The one-of-a-kind actress gave us unforgettable performances in Days of Heaven and Out of the Blue.

Aug 18, 2020 — A sensuous exploration of amorous discontent and dreadful miscalculation, The Comfort of Strangers (1990) could be described as an erotic thriller, though it rarely is: its eroticism is too perverse, its pedigree too highbrow. Directed by Paul Schrader and based...

Aug 12, 2020 — Mia Hansen-Løve makes delicate, graceful films about overpowering emotions. After beginning her career in front of the camera, acting in Olivier Assayas’s Late August, Early September (1998) and Les destinées (2000) as a teenager, she transitioned to directing at the...

Aug 11, 2020 — I’ve often found that the most successful short films and short stories apply what Ernest Hemingway called the “iceberg theory,” distilling a larger narrative into a very specific moment that allows audiences to infer the bigger picture in their own...

Aug 3, 2020 — The first European box-office success of the movement dubbed the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s 1975 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum took on a hot-button issue: the paranoia provoked by homegrown terrorism and the opportunity that...