The Search

Apr 20, 2020 — This month sees new books by and about Woody Allen, Miranda July, and Michael Snow as well as fresh translations and collections of criticism.

Dec 19, 2019 — Lists (of course), but also philosophical surveys, biographies, and coffee table books are featured in this month’s round.

Jan 29, 2018 — “It is an altogether extraordinary life, the stuff of epic,” writes Simon Callow, having just taken us from milestone to milestone in the first fifteen paragraphs of an outstanding piece for the New York Review of Books. “And now, it...

Feb 24, 2017 — Cinema lost one of its most venerated maestros of excess last week with the passing of director Seijun Suzuki, whose signature films from the 1960s exploded the conventions of the Japanese studio system. While honing his craft in dozens of...

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.

Jan 31, 2005 — With this early work, Bernardo Bertolucci confidently demonstrated the instinctive lyricism and sensuality that in his maturity would become his very own signature.

Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki's penultimate film for Nikkatsu is a subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist.

Mar 16, 2021 — In Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), play is a life force, pleasure a form of liberation. Drawing inspiration from cartoons, Hollywood musicals, and the vaudeville shenanigans of early screen comedy in the vein of Buster Keaton and the Marx...

Sep 30, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 More than eight decades since its release, Dos monjes (1934) continues to invite reappraisals, as much for its expressionist style—exceptional within Mexican cinema—as for its nonlinear narrative and for the creative contributions of...