Character

Nov 13, 2017 — Two of the most lucrative franchises in the history of franchises are being revamped, one for theaters, the other for home screens. “Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson [above] has been set by Disney and Lucasfilm to write...

Nov 13, 2017 — New York. “Largely terra incognita, West German cinema before Fassbinder was distinguished by films made by returning exiles, Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, as well as a number of strong, critical movies, some of them international hits, by Helmut Käutner, who began his career under...

Nov 5, 2017 — New York. “It’s probably pure coincidence that BAM is presenting a week of Sam Shepard films right as the Metrograph screens five days of Dennis Hopper–directed titles,” writes Bilge Ebiri. “No two actors of their generation better expressed the modern...

Nov 2, 2017 — In the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri looks back to the day in 1992 when, as a college freshman, he dropped everything, skipped his classes, and took a train from New Haven to New York to see a movie: Orson Welles’s...

Nov 1, 2017 — “If you go to a single production this season, make it this one.” That’s Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic for the New York Times, enthusiastically recommending Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, an opera inspired by Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film and...

Oct 27, 2017 — In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk, one of the most widely celebrated and commercially successful films of the summer, we’re revisiting the filmmaker’s no-less-inventive low-budget beginnings in this week’s Short + Feature, now streaming on the Criterion...

Oct 24, 2017 — New York. The Anthology Film Archives’ series Boxing on Film: Part 2 is on through October 31, and William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, The Greatest (1974), screening once more on Saturday, “evades fight footage and instead alights upon the press appearances...

Oct 14, 2017 — Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel is “a passionate comedic drama that unfolds some of the tones of Allen’s youth,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “It’s set in the early nineteen-fifties, in Coney Island, and Allen lends the drama a structure...

Oct 12, 2017 — Last week, after years of rumors and aborted attempts to bring it to light, Hollywood’s “open secret” finally became a story fit to print. On Thursday, October 5, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times that...

Oct 11, 2017 — The Literary Hub is running excerpts from A Dance with Fred Astaire in which Jonas Mekas recalls his encounters with Anaïs Nin, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Aldous Huxley. Stan Brakhage (image above) wrote Metaphors on Vision in 1963, putting...