An Enemy of the People

Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

Aug 20, 2024 — In the late 1980s, filmmakers Gregorio Rocha and Sarah Minter set out to capture the rebellious subculture of youth in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a slumlike suburb synonymous with the worst failures of urban expansion in Mexico.

Jan 24, 2023 — The German contingent is strong: Margarethe von Trotta, Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Emily Atef.

Dec 12, 2017 — “Evil is ascendant,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “The Resistance—an intrepid, multi-everything group whose leaders include a battle-tested woman warrior—has been fighting the good fight for years but is outnumbered and occasionally outmaneuvered. Yes, the latest Star...

Jul 20, 2017 — Director Ken Loach and his longtime screenwriting partner Paul Laverty, recipients of this year’s Crystal Globe award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, speak about the complex relationship between politics and cinema.

Dec 17, 2020 — The year 1999 was several months old when I entered Los Guajolotes, a restaurant that, like so many others in Mexico City, has now disappeared. I was walking to my table when a person who appeared to live on the streets...

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

Sep 22, 2020 — Francesco Rosi’s film Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) is based on Carlo Levi’s novelistic memoir of the same name, which became an instant classic of Italian literature when it appeared at the end of World War II, in 1945. In...

Apr 9, 2018 — “Most famous for the exquisite 1979 family classic The Black Stallion, and, to a slightly lesser extent, 1996’s Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin-starring drama Far Away Home, [Carroll] Ballard is—despite making only six films in a period of almost forty...