The Official Story

Aug 17, 2022 — Our late summer reading list includes vital film criticism and new titles on Josephine Baker, Douglas Fairbanks, and more.

Mar 19, 2021 — We’ve been watching and reading about films by Cecilia Mangini, Cheryl Dunye, Claire Denis, and Nina Menkes.

Mar 1, 2018 — This year’s edition of the True/False Film Fest opens today in Columbia, Missouri and runs through Sunday. “The festival focuses on nonfiction films, though True/False’s definition of the term is intentionally porous,” writes Aarik Danielsen during the course of his...

Sep 2, 2017 — Remembering Jerry Lewis in a piece for the Guardian, Martin Scorsese recalls working with him on King of Comedy: “Jerry Langford was an uncomfortable role for him to play, because he was skirting the edges of his own life in...

Aug 17, 2015 — François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.

Jul 7, 2015 — Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that late-forties...

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...

Nov 29, 2011 — Elephant Boy: Child’s Play It’s hard to imagine a movie role more perfectly suited to the actor playing it than Toomai in Elephant Boy (1937), the part that made Selar Shaik—known as Sabu—one of the least likely superstars in Western...

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.