The Black Ghiandola

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

May 3, 2018 — Depth, beauty, curiosity—what gave luminous French star Danielle Darrieux staying power across eight decades? Critic Farran Smith Nehme looks for the answer in two films from opposite ends of her career.

Apr 18, 2018 — Before we lost Milos Forman and Vittorio Taviani over the weekend, the Slovak Spectator reported that Juraj Herz, the Czech actor and director best known for his 1968 film The Cremator, had passed away at the age of eighty-three. Just...

Apr 11, 2018 — The Cannes Film Festival has announced the lineup for its seventy-first edition, running from May 8 through 19. Artistic director Thierry Frémaux has declared that this year’s Official Selection represents “a great renewal,” a new generation of filmmakers reflecting the...

Mar 30, 2018 — New York. “Today’s manliest movie stars—mostly buffed-up superheroes like your Chrises Hemsworth, Pratt, and Evans—are scientifically enlarged and formed by state-of-the-art training and diet regimens,” writes Vern in the Village Voice. “Guys like Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and...

Mar 29, 2018 — New York. “Billed as a ‘meta-soap opera,’ Personal Problems is nothing less than an explosion of the television form,” begins Chuck Bowen at Slant. “Directed by Bill Gunn, the two-part, nearly three-hour miniseries was shot on video for a low...

Mar 8, 2018 — “The cinephiles attending the twenty-third edition of Rendez-Vous With French Cinema at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this year may relate a little too hard to Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s new film, A Paris Education, about a movie-obsessed young man named...

Feb 28, 2018 — New York. Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema opens tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Sunday. Writing for the Notebook, Ela Bittencourt points out that “a number of films stand out for either their carefully...

Feb 24, 2018 — Starting yesterday, and on through Wednesday, Anthology Film Archives in New York is presenting a series curated by Steve Erickson, Documentary, Iranian Style: The Films of Mehrdad Oskouei. “It’s about as essential a film series as I can imagine,” writes...

Feb 22, 2018 — Luis Buñuel was born on this day, February 22, in 1900. “By 1961, Buñuel was born again, so to speak,” writes Jeremy Carr, having sketched the career from Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930) through the years in...