Times For

Oct 8, 2017 — Lady Bird screens at the New York Film Festival this evening and tomorrow night, and we begin with Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay: “Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with this controlled, coolly compassionate and autobiographical-feeling post-9/11 teenage tale. Saoirse Ronan plays...

Oct 7, 2017 — “In just two adaptations,” begins Benedict Seal at Vague Visages, “author Brian Selznick has developed a reputation for inspiring intelligent and magical children’s films. After John Logan adapted The Invention of Hugo Cabaret for Martin Scorsese’s wonderful Hugo, Selznick has...

Oct 7, 2017 — We begin with Angelo Muredda, writing for Cinema Scope: “Joachim Trier makes a sterling if somewhat noncommittal bid for post-horror with Thelma, a slow-burn supernatural thriller about a Norwegian teen (Eili Harboe) who goes away to college (and away from...

Oct 6, 2017 — Kevin Jerome Everson has a nine-minute short screening as part of Projections’ Program 1: Speculative Spaces at the New York Film Festival. In IFO, “which stands for ‘Identified Flying Object,’ African Americans look up at the skies and report alien...

Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...

Oct 5, 2017 — This is the documentary that put an end to Steven Spielberg’s plans to produce a narrative feature—to be directed by Sam Mendes—based on Gay Talese’s book, The Voyeur’s Motel. Spielberg had bought the rights after the New Yorker ran an...

Oct 5, 2017 — The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017 has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” announces the Swedish Academy. Ishiguro is probably...

Oct 4, 2017 — We begin with Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker about Alain Gomis’s Félicité, “a dramatic portrait of a fierce, intrepid woman—a single mother and a powerfully expressive cabaret singer (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) in Kinshasa who is wrenched from...

Oct 4, 2017 — Starting today, and on through October 15, the sixty-first BFI London Film Festival will present over 240 features—premieres, revivals, and hand-picked highlights from the year’s festival calendar so far—and nearly 130 short films. Our guide here won’t—can’t—be complete, but with...

Oct 2, 2017 — The celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Mitchum—he was born on August 6, 1917 and died in 1997, just one month short of his eightieth birthday—began in earnest this summer when Il Cinema Ritrovato presented its...