To Be or Not to Be

Sep 28, 2017 — Let’s start today with a few interviews. I’ve opened the NYFF 2017 Index with a snippet from poet Peter Gizzi’s conversation with New York Film Festival director Kent Jones for BOMB, but I want to flag it again because they...

Sep 27, 2017 — The fifty-fifth edition of the New York Film Festival opens tomorrow and runs through October 15. In his latest “Cinema ’67 Revisited” column for Film Comment, Mark Harris looks back at the fifth edition, noting that “Susan Sontag began her...

Sep 26, 2017 — Let’s start today’s round with a few books. Next month sees the release of Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Dave Kehr’s followup to his 2011 book, When Movies Mattered. Before he became a curator in the...

Sep 25, 2017 — New York. From October 12 through 26, the Metrograph will present Philippe Garrel: Part 1, the first half of the most complete retrospective ever to be staged in the U.S. I’m flagging this event early not only because the New...

Sep 24, 2017 — For the final issue in print of the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri talks with Jonas Mekas, “the 94-year-old filmmaker, artist, critic, poet, photographer, cinema owner, and all-around underground impresario who transformed film criticism, filmmaking, and exhibition throughout the 1960s and...

Sep 22, 2017 — New York. Ben Kenigsberg flags three items in the Times, starting with Art House Theater Day, “a day in which cinemas across the United States and Canada will offer special programming in a show of celebration.” In New York, Thelma...

Sep 21, 2017 — The big “in the works” news today is the release of the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, embedded below. According to the official synopsis from Fox Searchlight, Anderson’s second stop-motion animated feature after Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) “tells...

Sep 21, 2017 — The editors of Senses of Cinema open Issue 84 with a “near exhaustive dossier” on Christian Petzold and a second entitled “Sartre at the Movies.” Here, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of French cinema, Dudley Andrew, explores the ideas...

Sep 20, 2017 — New York. “Like a modern character from Crete’s ancient Minoan culture, trailblazer artist Joan Jonas weaves symbols and media to transfigure feminist and psychological themes,” writes Mónica Savirón for BOMB. “Her work juxtaposes sculpture, painting, film, video, and performance as...

Sep 19, 2017 — Film Comment editor Nicolas Rapold has posted his overview of this year’s Venice International Film Festival, and a “Telluride 2017 Journal” from the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez is up there, too. But FC’s gone all out on...