The Time You Need a Friend

Oct 19, 2021 — The works of great artists have a way of reactivating fundamental questions about the nature and potential of an art form. In the case of filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, these questions revolve around a word that has been used routinely to...

Oct 6, 2023 — Notes on a “gobsmacking” Mexican classic, Isabelle Adjani’s secrets, and underground cinephilia in Iran.

Jul 23, 2021 — Deep Dives In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own...

Jun 11, 2018 — Building on a rich lineage of gothic fairy tales and noirish melodramas, this lavishly stylized curio has an ominous beauty all its own.

Sep 27, 2022 — Darius Marder’s Oscar-nominated drama captures the isolation and despair of a man who suddenly goes deaf and struggles in vain to regain his former life.

Aug 9, 2017 — New York. “Though Fire Island is the movie’s very recognizable locale, it is filmed in arcadianly remote aspects of sunlight, shade and water, and narrated simply on the solemn, picturesque, stark level of myth. . . . The world as...

Jun 16, 2017 — The title of the first part of Tom Paulus’s projected three-part essay for photogénie, “The Love Connection: Another Jam Session on Narrative,” references “Jam Session on Non-Narrative,” a conversation that took place between film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Ehrenstein, and...

Apr 26, 2022 — In the opening moments of Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (2020), we first hear—the ceaseless hum of machines at work—and then see: a jumble of multicolored wires. The 16 mm film image is grainy, trembling ever...

Jul 22, 2013 — Gabriel Axel’s exquisite adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short tale of grace through art provides spiritual and sensual sustenance.

Feb 26, 2021 — There would be no Indonesian cinema without Usmar Ismail (1921–71). His third feature, The Long March (Darah dan doa, 1950), was not only the first film to be produced by a fully Indonesian crew and production company but also one...