A World Apart

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

Sep 6, 2017 — New York. Back in April, Film Forum presented The Complete Wiseman: Part 1: Early Wiseman, the first half of a Frederick Wiseman retrospective that, as Matt Prigge notes in the Village Voice, “covered the prolific and pioneering documentarian’s angriest period.”...

Sep 1, 2017 — New York. “A film series dedicated to one episode of a television series is—without going overboard—fairly unprecedented,” writes Jeremy Polacek for Hyperallergic, previewing Gotta Light?, the Metrograph series built around Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, now on through...

Jul 26, 2017 — Shot by Carlo Di Palma, from Rome to New York is the title of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series celebrating the work of the cinematographer who worked with some of Italy’s greatest directors before moving to the States...

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...

Oct 4, 2011 — The spectacle of joyless lubricity and dehumanizing cruelty and carnage visualized by Pier Paolo Pasolini could not be further from the dry, dense, and circular arguments to be found in the printed pages of his bibliographic sources.

Jan 25, 2011 —  Sapphire: Inner City Given his strikingly eclectic body of work, it’s not surprising that Basil Dearden has never become a household name—he’s too hard to pin down. Moving effortlessly among comedies, melodramas, and thrillers, over a thirty-five-film, nearly thirty-year career,...

Sep 29, 2003 — Roman Polanski’s maiden feature would define his maverick status once and for all.

Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...