In This World

Aug 5, 2017 — “Two gloriously muscled bodybuilders eye each other with distrust, envy and contempt at the gym in Denis Côte’s A Soft the Skin.” That’s one of the moments from the first days of this year’s Locarno Festival that has stuck with...

Aug 3, 2017 — Mónica Delgado, José Sarmiento Hinojosa, and Ivonne Sheen of desistfilm recently “had a chance to enjoy lunch and a nice conversation with Austrian film maverick Peter Tscherkassky and American avant-garde filmmaker Eve Heller, one of the most talented couples in...

Jun 15, 2017 — New York. “Among the most savage and surreal of Italian comedies, starring one of the country’s biggest stars”—Alberto Sordi—“and directed by one of its legendary filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom barely made a ripple when first released, in 1963,...

May 23, 2017 — “Of all of the documentaries made about North Korea by Westerners in recent years, Claude Lanzmann’s Napalm, which premiered Sunday out of competition at Cannes, is by far the most peculiar, not to mention the most brazenly narcissistic,” writes Cineaste...

May 8, 2017 — With his mix of documentary-like immediacy and profound moral inquiry, Roberto Rossellini became a pioneer of Italian neorealism, a movement that transformed the way filmmakers captured the fabric of everyday life and and grappled with the most urgent social issues...

Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.

Dec 6, 2016 — Photo by Janet Pierson In the late eighties and early nineties, American independent film was coming into its own both artistically and commercially, and John Pierson was at the center of the movement. Once described by the New York Times...

Sep 21, 2016 — An exhilarating blend of noir and splatter-flick tropes, the Coen brothers’ debut feature established their unique brand of cosmic fatalism.

Jul 12, 2016 — Herk Harvey’s influential, low-budget horror classic Carnival of Souls is an eerie exploration of the mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming.

Apr 20, 2016 — In an interview published this week at the A. V. Club, writer Adam Nayman sits down with actor Nina Hoss, the star of Christian Petzold’s haunting 2014 film Phoenix, which we’re releasing on disc next week. The film is a...