The Present

May 23, 2017 — “If you told me you could make a modern Christmas classic largely set outside a doughnut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, centered on transgender prostitutes and shot on iPhones, I wouldn’t have believed you,” begins Ben Kenigsberg at RogerEbert.com. “But...

Feb 27, 2017 — Last month, the world of silent-film history lost one of its most active proponents and preservationists.

Jan 27, 2017 — Did You See This? In a new interview with Film Comment, Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak discusses his collaborations with Krzysztof Kieślowski and his transition to working on Hollywood films like Gattaca and Black Hawk Down. “After the unexpected explosion of...

Oct 28, 2015 — For over fifty years, the brilliant composer and conductor Carl Davis has been enriching cinema with his evocative film scores. Although well-known for his silent movie work—he's created orchestrations for the re-releases of films like Harold Lloyd’s Speedy and Charlie...

Aug 29, 2012 — With humor and melancholy, Franc Roddam’s coming-of-age drama, based on the Who’s iconic album, shows us a g-g-generation on the edge.

Oct 25, 2011 — The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.

Feb 2, 2011 — This essay first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the author. Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was...

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Dec 9, 2018 — Songbook The final scene of Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville belongs to the transient wannabe singer Albuquerque, played by the late Barbara Harris. Up to that point, the storyline has followed numerous musician characters who are striving to get discovered or bolster...