Like a French Film

Jan 31, 2025 — As an Australian classic turns fifty, we’re also reading about Leos Carax and Catherine Breillat.

Sep 20, 2023 — Few of Wang’s films contrast as starkly as Youth (Spring) and Man in Black, and both are set to screen in New York.

Feb 9, 2022 — Restorations and revivals of works by two unjustly overlooked filmmakers are now underway.

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

Sep 15, 2020 — When Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) first appeared on American screens, the critic Stephen Holden used a striking phrase to capture its embracing of bold opposites: “voluptuous austerity.” His characterization, widely quoted since, illuminates the film on many levels, and...

Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...

Mar 14, 2018 — We begin with news from the two big festivals of April. SFFILM has now completed the lineup of for this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, running from April 4 through 17 in theaters throughout the Bay Area. 183 films...

Jan 5, 2018 — For the seventh year running, the First Look festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York presents “formally inventive new works that seek to redefine the art form while engaging in a wide range of subjects and...

Oct 24, 2017 — In this intimate psychological thriller, Olivier Assayas interrogates contemporary society’s near-religious reliance on technology and its mediation of reality.

Nov 3, 2015 — We present an excerpt from the book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, by Dennis Lim.