Difficult Years

May 14, 2020 — Sorely missing the festival this year, filmmakers and critics swap memories and reflections.

May 11, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of four features and several shorts, Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf has mined the histories hidden in archives, stitching together a rich and complicated view of twentieth-century America. He’s drawn to subjects that are misunderstood...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Apr 22, 2020 — Deep Dives The Forest for the Trees, by German filmmaker Maren Ade, is one of the deepest depictions of loneliness on-screen. After serving as a television producer and shooting two shorts, Ade made this first feature, based on her own...

Apr 15, 2020 — While three parallel programs have cancelled, Cannes still holds out hope for a 2020 edition. Here’s the latest on how the virus is affecting cinema.

Apr 9, 2020 — The American Cinematheque premieres a delightful five-minute film that Varda made in 2008.

Mar 17, 2020 — Released in, or rather let loose upon, the first year of the new millennium, Spike Lee’s febrile and ferocious media satire Bamboozled—the fifteenth feature-length “joint” of a prolific career—found its writer-director in an unflinching mode and an unforgiving mood. According...

Mar 5, 2020 — One of the most vital showcases of new nonfiction work is now on through Sunday.

Mar 3, 2020 — Mohammad Rasoulof has won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear, and Eliza Hittman is taking home the grand jury prize.

Feb 26, 2020 — Before making history last year as the first black woman director to compete at Cannes, Mati Diop had been spending the previous ten years articulating her unique vision in a series of five acclaimed short films. The praise Diop has...