The Tasters

Mar 8, 2018 — Let’s start with some festival news, primarily because a big one, SXSW, is opening tomorrow in Austin. Jay Duplass is on the cover of the new issue of the Austin Chronicle, which features a whopping preview package. “Few filmmaker names...

Feb 12, 2018 — Before looking ahead to some of this week’s highlights city by city, we have some festival news to see to. The Venice International Film Festival has announced that Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) will preside over the International...

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...

Apr 20, 2017 — Programmer Michael Sragow and former Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Peña discuss the holy grail of cinephile TV series and the legendary figures it profiled.

Apr 7, 2017 — Did You See This? Radley Metzger, the erotica pioneer who took soft core and hard core to new heights of artistry, has passed away at the age of eighty-eight. The New York Times remembers the director’s career, which began in...

Dec 12, 2016 — Patriotic masterminds choreograph capers from secret headquarters while dashing secret agents execute their plans by the light of flashing blades and gunfire. Jeopardy escalates second to second until our heroes and heroines escape by the skin of their teeth. Spy...

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Sep 6, 2012 — Repertory PicksStarting this week, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cinematheque joins forces with the university’s Chazen Museum of Art to cast a spotlight on Italian art. In conjunction with the Chazen’s exhibition Offering of the Angels: Paintings and Tapestries from the...

Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.

Oct 1, 2025 — In his second stop-motion feature, Wes Anderson grapples with what it means to acknowledge one another within systems that separate beings between pet and master, wild and tamed.