Hell in the City

Feb 6, 2018 — “A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for...

Jan 21, 2018 — “Filmed entirely within an emergency call center, Danish director Gustav Möller’s The Guilty (Den skyldige) is a claustrophobic thriller that finds fascinating ways to transcend, spiritually, its confines,” begins Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Pretty much the whole film...

Jan 12, 2018 — Yance Ford’s Strong Island, which “mines his intense personal history of growing up on Long Island in the ’80s, with a focus on the murder of his brother and the shockwaves it sent through their entire family,” has won Outstanding...

Dec 25, 2017 — New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama rolls on through January 7. “The genre of melodrama, which displays the grand, tragic passions that mark everyday lives while also detailing historical events that knock those...

Dec 18, 2017 — When Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara with Jeanne Balibar premiered in the Un Certain Regard program of this year’s Cannes Film Festival in May, it won an award for Best Poetic Narrative. A month later, it won the Jean Vigo Award, and...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Noah Baumbach has always been a writer-director of no formal distinction, but he's possessed with a keen eye and ear for the intricacies of pettiness, humiliation, and schadenfreude,” begins Steve Macfarlane at Slant. “His new film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New...

Sep 10, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water has won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. We’ve been gathering reviews here, and we’ll carry on, too, as the film screens in Toronto throughout the coming week.This year’s...

Aug 20, 2017 — “Jerry Lewis, the brash slapstick comic who teamed with Dean Martin in the 1950s and later starred in The Nutty Professor and The Bellboy before launching the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, has died,” report Richard Natale and Carmel Dagan for Variety....

Aug 4, 2017 — New York. The Elephant in the Room: The Films of Alan Clarke, a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, opens today and runs through August 20. “Films like Elephant, Christine, and Contact, all of which play on this series’ opening night,...

Jul 12, 2017 — New York. A retrospective of films by Alain Tanner opens today at the Metrograph and runs through July 23. Writing for Hyperallergic, Craig Hubert looks back on work Tanner did with the late critic, novelist, painter, and poet John Berger,...