Game of Death

Jan 15, 2021 — Songbook 1.There is music in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking that arises from the home itself. It sounds like eddies of conversation around a kitchen counter, as persistent as the crackle of frying oil. It sounds like the patter, so similar...

Oct 16, 2020 — This week we’re reading Jacques Rancière on Pedro Costa, J. Hoberman on Pietro Marcello and Jack London, and Sasha Frere-Jones on Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Feb 5, 2020 — Performances Judy Davis chomps softly into Naked Lunch: into twisted behavior, into the nuanced meat of the moment, into the juicy black center of the psychic abyss. Bombed-out but supernally alert and incongruously amused, she injects a syringe into her...

Jan 29, 2019 — The renowned composer made movie history with his collaborations with Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Losey, and Barbra Streisand.

Jan 22, 2018 — “It is a part he was born to play, and he does it with exactly the right kind of poignantly ruined magnificence,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Rupert Everett has written, directed and starred in this gripping drama about Oscar...

Dec 4, 2017 — Over the weekend, word began coursing through social media that Ulli Lommel had passed away at the age of seventy-three. Now Doris Kuhn confirms in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the actor and director known to most for his work with...

Jun 21, 2017 — Those lists of twenty-five best films of the twenty-first century (so far) keep coming, and J. Hoberman’s now posted his, too. He’s customized the rules somewhat, and we can be glad: “My single ‘best’ film-object”—Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010)—“is followed...

Aug 31, 2011 — French sociologist Roger Caillois proposed that every form of human recreation could be placed somewhere on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia. The first of these represents games defined almost wholly by their rule systems. Crossword puzzles and...

Mar 12, 2018 — When the SXSW Film Festival presented the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One last night, “technical difficulties KO’ed the sound for the second time in a row, bringing the dizzying, VFX-fueled video game adventure to a grinding halt...