Work

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Aug 30, 2019 — This week, a feminist journal folds, a filmmaker pens a manifesto, and Richard Linklater commits to a twenty-year project.

Aug 30, 2019 — In 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, after being censured for its invasion of Manchuria. Despite this, the majority of Japanese people remained avid consumers of American movies and Western fashion, which exasperated the militarists in power. A...

Aug 30, 2019 — Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy is a true marvel of narrative construction: the neorealist-like odyssey of Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) gives way to the slippery intermingling of fact and fiction in And Life Goes On (1992), a road movie...

Aug 29, 2019 — Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche star as a mother and daughter clashing over contrasting versions of their past.

Aug 28, 2019 — 1. Before he became a filmmaker, D. A. Pennebaker’s ambition was to play stride piano like Fats Waller. “What changed your mind?” I asked him. “Well,” Penny replied, “after I saw Fats play . . . ” Penny would have...

Aug 27, 2019 — In the run-up to Venice, Telluride, and Toronto, New York announces its retrospective and revivals.

Aug 27, 2019 — In 1986, having made a number of child-centered films in his position as the head of the filmmaking division at Iran’s Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (an organization Iranians call Kanoon), Abbas Kiarostami accepted a...

Aug 26, 2019 — In the first twenty-four features he directed, between 1925 and 1939, Alfred Hitchcock —always working closely with his wife Alma Reville (variously credited for assistant direction, screenplay, and continuity)—evolved from apprenticeship to technical mastery to an exuberant flowering that made...

Aug 23, 2019 — A good number of the pieces that have stood out this week examine the ways that music and cinema have informed each other’s traditions.