Seems Like Old Times

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

Nov 15, 2018 — In two made-for-television productions, a middle-aged Ingmar Bergman blurred the boundaries between screen and stage.

Jun 21, 2018 — I have lost count of the number of times I have had the pleasure of watching El Sur, but I suspect it is among the films I have seen most frequently in my life. It is a treasure chest that reveals...

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

Apr 6, 2018 — Angela Schanelec’s films “represent the most innovative use of ‘conventional’ editing in narrative cinema since Pialat who, along with Bresson, has been a clear influence,” writes Michael Sicinski for the Notebook. “Schanelec’s contribution is what we might call the ‘epistemological...

Apr 2, 2018 — Updates are still coming into the first entry on this year’s New Directors/New Films running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This entry will take us all the way through...

Mar 12, 2018 — After Paula Prentiss, who’s recently turned eighty, had a nervous breakdown on the set of What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), she “didn’t turn up in another movie until Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1970), by which time Hollywood had changed to the point...

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Dec 15, 2017 — The International Film Festival Rotterdam has been rolling out the lineup for its 2018 edition (January 24 through February 4) in quick spurts over the past few weeks, and it’s far from complete. But there’s already more than enough to...