† This is the Life

Dec 12, 2017 — On the new episode of the Supporting Characters podcast (123’49”), Bill Ackerman talks with author and film critic Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies and, most recently, Steven Spielberg: A Life...

Dec 6, 2017 — Before breaking events down by city, let’s note that, to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, Canyon Cinema is taking four 16 mm programs and two digital packages on the road—coast to coast and many, many points in between. Here’s a map...

Dec 4, 2017 — Last Wednesday, the Sundance Film Festival unleashed the entire features lineup for its 2018 edition, running from January 18 through 28. Today, the festival’s adding lineups for a new Indie Episodic section as well as its Shorts and Special Events...

Dec 4, 2017 — One of the most anticipated highlights of lists and awards season is David Ehrlich’s spectacularly edited video countdown of his favorite films of the year. Today sees the 2017 edition that he’s been teasing on Twitter finally go live, and...

Nov 17, 2017 — G rasshopper Film has posted Ted Fendt’s essay on Moses and Aaron (1974), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera: “Straub and Huillet’s brilliance—and a fundamental aspect of their method of adaptation—is to allow the contradictions...

Nov 16, 2017 — “Hong Sang-soo has a reputation for being a tricky interview, and he knows it,” writes Darren Hughes in the Notebook. But if anyone can get Hong talking, it’s Hughes. Take a look at this page. Gathered here are some of...

Nov 12, 2017 — In Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, Nancy Schoenberger “has hidden a provocative thesis,” suggests Stephen Metcalf, writing for the Atlantic. “She asks us to remember the beauty of masculine self-mastery as...

Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...

Oct 26, 2017 — Senses of Cinema has launched a podcast and topics discussed in the first episode (62’45”) include Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Jacques Tourneur, and the Mexican narco wars onscreen. And speaking of Blade Runner, Cinematologists Dario Llinares and Neil Fox...

Oct 14, 2017 — Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel is “a passionate comedic drama that unfolds some of the tones of Allen’s youth,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “It’s set in the early nineteen-fifties, in Coney Island, and Allen lends the drama a structure...