The First Year

Feb 26, 2018 — New York. He Who Gets Slapped (1924) screens this evening at Film Forum as part of the series Victor Sjöström: The Screen’s First Master. Lon Chaney “is brilliant as a man who has chosen madness over grief,” writes Jon Dieringer,...

Feb 25, 2018 — “James Baldwin and Karl Marx—the subjects of my two most recent films—were my two primary teachers; each in his own way taught me how to think, how to be, how to engage,” writes Raoul Peck, director of I Am Not...

Feb 25, 2018 — “Sridevi Kapoor, best known by her mononym Sridevi and a major Bollywood star, died Saturday night in UAE of cardiac arrest,” reports Erin Nyren for Variety. “Sridevi worked in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films before debuting in Hindi films....

Feb 20, 2018 — David Bordwell has revisited The Donovan Affair (1929), “Columbia’s first all-talking picture, and Frank Capra’s as well.” It’s “an unusually fluid early talkie” and studying it teaches us “some things about those transitional years 1928-1932, when filmmakers were figuring out...

Feb 12, 2018 — Icelandic composer, musician, and producer Jóhann Jóhannsson is gone too early at the age of forty-eight. “Known for compositions that often blended electronics with classical orchestrations, Jóhannsson credits include the Golden Globe-winning score for 2015’s The Theory of Everything,” writes...

Feb 5, 2018 — New York. “Tonight, Anthology Film Archives continues its Documentarists for a Day series with a rare pairing of nonfiction offerings from Nagisa Oshima that reveal an introspective side to the famously outspoken political filmmaker,” writes Kazu Watanabe at Screen Slate....

Feb 5, 2018 — This year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the occasion for Jill Lepore’s outstanding piece in this week’s New Yorker: Frankenstein is four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an...

Feb 2, 2018 — New York. First, we look past the new few days with a few lineup announcements. EW’s Clark Collis reports on Pacino’s Way, a retrospective of over twenty-five films, “the majority screening on 35 mm prints,” that will run at the...

Jan 26, 2018 — We turn first to IndieWire’s David Ehrlich: “‘The emotions you are having are not your own, they are someone else’s. You are not the cat—you are inside the cat.’ So begins Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, an ecstatically disorienting experience that...

Dec 27, 2017 — Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost some writers who’ve made unique contributions to film criticism. At Film Studies for Free, Catherine Grant has posted an entry in memory of “radical film and media scholar” Chuck Kleinhans. “Along with...