The Big Shot

Oct 23, 2017 — David Bordwell’s new book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, is out, and we’ll be hearing more about it soon. For now, though, New Yorkers will want to know that Bordwell’s coming to town, specifically to the Museum...

Oct 8, 2017 — Lady Bird screens at the New York Film Festival this evening and tomorrow night, and we begin with Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay: “Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with this controlled, coolly compassionate and autobiographical-feeling post-9/11 teenage tale. Saoirse Ronan plays...

Oct 7, 2017 — “In just two adaptations,” begins Benedict Seal at Vague Visages, “author Brian Selznick has developed a reputation for inspiring intelligent and magical children’s films. After John Logan adapted The Invention of Hugo Cabaret for Martin Scorsese’s wonderful Hugo, Selznick has...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Having placed second in Toronto’s People’s Choice Awards, James Franco scored his first big outright win as a director, his The Disaster Artist scooping Saturday night the 65th San Sebastián Festival’s Golden Shell, the top plaudit at the highest-profile film...

Sep 30, 2017 — “I have seen Zama, and it does indeed have a llama,” announces Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson in the new issue. “The mysterious circumstances of the film’s long-overdue birth into this world continue with an out-of-competition slot in Venice, an...

Sep 24, 2017 — For the final issue in print of the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri talks with Jonas Mekas, “the 94-year-old filmmaker, artist, critic, poet, photographer, cinema owner, and all-around underground impresario who transformed film criticism, filmmaking, and exhibition throughout the 1960s and...

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...

Sep 17, 2017 — There’s no getting around the loaded real-world context on this one. For the Daily Beast, Richard Porton begins with the “various accusations about [Louis C.K.’s] supposed sexual misconduct, which have been floating around for years since a 2012 Gawker story...

Sep 1, 2017 — “There are any number of unforgettable images in Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, the most necessary and comprehensive documentary to date about our planet’s current refugee crisis,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “but the most indelible of them all is borrowed from...

Aug 31, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, premiering in Competition in Venice and screening as a Special Presentation in Toronto, is a “ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore, [offering] more straight-up movie for...