Close-Up

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

Jun 28, 2018 — As two festivals in New York survey the best of new Japanese cinema, it’s “Summer in Japan” in Toronto.

Jun 20, 2018 — A Motion Selfie is a wryly comic silent film made by a crew of one.

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 14, 2018 — In the singular world of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, auteurist homage and social consciousness are joined by some of the most lovingly filmed dogs in contemporary cinema.

May 8, 2018 — In his uncharacteristic final masterpiece, the great Hollywood melodramatist Frank Borzage approaches the shadowy violence of film noir with his unique brand of romanticism.

May 7, 2018 — And it’s May ’68 all over again in New York, D.C., and London. Plus Bergman in L.A., Tarkovsky in San Sebastián, and more.

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 20, 2018 — “Jiri Trnka didn’t craft his puppet-cartoon shorts and features merely to imitate life,” writes Michael Sragow for Film Comment. “His endlessly original and inventive movies incorporate life, or transcend it. Trnka insisted that he was ‘local,’ and drew many of...

Apr 10, 2018 — New York. A new 4K restoration of Liquid Sky opens at the Quad on Friday. “At last,” writes Alan Scherstuhl in the Village Voice, “after sitting out the DVD and streaming eras, Slava Tsukerman’s 1982 neon-fired New Wave New York...