The Criterion Collection
Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...
Sep 11, 2017 — “Brace yourselves,” warns Leonardo Goi, writing for Cinema Scope: “after the American sojourn that brought the likes of Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2 and a detour into Chinese historical-blockbuster mode with Red Cliff, John Woo has returned to the Asian...
The Daily
Sep 10, 2017 — “Fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant horror-satire The Death of Stalin,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “It’s a sulphurous black comedy about the backstairs Kremlin intrigue that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953,...
The Daily
Sep 8, 2017 — “Argentinian first-timer Natalia Garagiola’s Hunting Season, a father-son drama set in the wilds of Patagonia, is the winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week prize,” announces Variety’s Nick Vivarelli. The prize, chosen by the festival audience, goes to a...
The Daily
Jun 16, 2017 — Robert Kolker “is best known for his landmark study A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman (1980), now in its fourth edition, as is his influential textbook, Film Form and Culture (1999),” writes Jonathan Kirshner for the Boston...
May 27, 2017 — “Some filmmakers rust during periods of inactivity,” begins Guy Lodge in Variety. “Lynne Ramsay arches and tenses, lying in wait like an attack dog. And attack she does, though not in all the expected ways, in her astonishing fourth feature...
May 23, 2017 — “If you told me you could make a modern Christmas classic largely set outside a doughnut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, centered on transgender prostitutes and shot on iPhones, I wouldn’t have believed you,” begins Ben Kenigsberg at RogerEbert.com. “But...
May 22, 2017 — Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer “makes the absurd, amazing The Lobster seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison,” declares Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “A film of clean hands, cold heart, and near-Satanic horror, it...
May 22, 2017 — “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) isn’t the wittiest or most exciting movie that Noah Baumbach has ever made, but it might just be the most humane,” writes David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “While all of his films have a cutting...
May 22, 2017 — To toast the seventieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, which has been in full swing since last Wednesday, I’m spending this week looking back on a top-prize winner from each decade of the festival’s history, dishing up details on...