Russian Lullabies

Sep 3, 2017 — “With writer-director James Toback, you never know quite what you’re going to get, quality-wise,” writes Glenn Kenny at RogerEbert.com. “What you do know you’re going to get is something very indicative of the personality of James Toback—defiant, searching, self-indulgent, absurdist,...

Aug 22, 2017 — BBC Culture has polled 253 film critics from fifty-two countries to come up with a list of the “100 greatest comedies of all time.” Nicholas Barber argues the case for the film that’s come out on top, Billy Wilder’s Some...

Aug 7, 2017 — The big news to catch up with here is the launch of Film Critic: Adrian Martin, “almost 20 years, on and off, in the making.” Adrian Martin has been writing essential film criticism for four decades now, and what’s collected...

Aug 7, 2017 — Todd Haynes is working on a documentary about the Velvet Underground, reports Variety’s John Hopewell. Speaking in Locarno, where he’s receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor for career achievement, Haynes says that he’ll “rely certainly on Warhol films but also a...

Aug 3, 2017 — Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry are teaming up on a new edition of Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision. “First published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of Film Culture, it stands as the major theoretical statement...

Jul 30, 2017 — “Everybody knows what’s wrong with Hollywood—the vacuous parade of tentpole blockbusters; the refusal to diversify both in front of and behind the camera; the confusion in the face of disruptions by Netflix and Amazon; the single-minded lust for the 13-year-old-male...

Jul 21, 2017 — The Venice International Film Festival has announced that Rosita (1923), “famed as the single collaboration between two of the giants of the silent screen, the director Ernst Lubitsch and the star Mary Pickford, is the film that has been chosen...

Jul 18, 2017 — During a period of personal turmoil, Andrei Tarkovsky created this enigmatic masterpiece, which explores spiritual and metaphysical mysteries through the prism of a science-fiction epic.

Jul 15, 2017 — “The film’s tag line was ‘They share the same body . . . but hate each other’s guts!’ I was told that the timing was a coincidence, but even before the film began it was clear that this was a...

Jul 10, 2017 — “While many of my more memorable screenings involved companions and cohorts—seeing Barbarella on a second date with the woman I’d eventually marry; catching a revival of Andrei Rublev with a friend as an elderly Russian lady noisily ate stinky borscht...