The Call

Dec 6, 2011 — Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933) is what sexy should be—delightful, romantic, agonizing ecstasy. And it’s not just sexy but also revolutionary, daring, sweet, sour, cynical, carefree, poignant, and so far ahead of its time that one could cite it...

May 26, 2011 — Last month, a new art-house theater opened here in Austin, the Violet Crown Cinema. (Our city has several pet names, and one of them is the City of the Violet Crown. Why it’s called that has been completely lost to...

Feb 11, 2011 — Danish cinematographer Henning Bendtsen—whose career stretched from the 1940s to 1991, with his final film, Lars von Trier’s Europa—has died at the age of eighty-five. Bendtsen is best known, perhaps, for the transcendent images he created with director Carl Theodor...

Nov 23, 2010 — Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended.

May 12, 2009 — This is one of our favorite new sites. At the end of April, Spike Jonze and friends started a blog celebrating the artists and other influences that come together in his upcoming film of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things...

Apr 30, 2009 — Following the lead of Andrew Sarris’s rave review last week, critics continue to praise Revanche, the brooding crime drama of guilt and retribution opening in theaters today, from Janus Films. “Revanche gets its hooks into you early and leaves them...

Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He has published two poetry collections—Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf—and is the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on...

Sep 21, 2026 — The first phase of the fall festival season wraps with a big win for Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La bola negra.

Jun 9, 2025 — Within the past few days, we’ve lost a vital film historian and a vibrant artist.