Songs XIX & XX

Jan 28, 2019 — With WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the late Serbian director made what Amos Vogel called “one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s.”

Jan 18, 2019 — Plaudits for Elaine May and Barbara Stanwyck, conversations with Elliott Gould and Bertrand Tavernier, and a rift between a filmmaker and his subject.

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...

Dec 7, 2018 — Christian Petzold’s films are like dances in which people circle each other but never quite connect. The most resonant moments in the German writer-director’s work are not ones of dialogue or plot development but of blocking and choreography: bodies intertwining,...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Nov 22, 2018 — A costume designer can make characters come alive. In this new interview, two historians explore how Orry-Kelly’s gowns helped Marilyn Monroe embody one of her finest roles.

Oct 23, 2018 — The complicated bond between a pair of identical twins takes center stage in the stylish short film An Act of Love, now playing on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Oct 9, 2018 — In a world vulnerable to authoritarianism, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television epic stands as an example of how an artist can speak to a broad audience about revolutionary politics.

Oct 2, 2018 — The past weighs heavily on the present in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Ash Is Purest White, and A Family Tour.

Sep 28, 2018 — Elisabeth Moss steers a ’90s-era rock band towards self-immolation.