A Special Day

Mar 8, 2018 — Let’s start with some festival news, primarily because a big one, SXSW, is opening tomorrow in Austin. Jay Duplass is on the cover of the new issue of the Austin Chronicle, which features a whopping preview package. “Few filmmaker names...

Mar 2, 2018 — New York. MoMA’s retrospective El Indio: The Films of Emilio Fernández is on through March 13. “With his longtime artistic comrade, the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, Fernández directed the movies that gave arthouse audiences worldwide their vision of post-colonial Mexico...

Feb 28, 2018 — A few days ago, we ran an essay here by Pico Iyer on Satyajit Ray’s The Hero (1966), followed by Meheli Sen’s comments on Uttam Kumar’s performance within the context of his stardom. Iyer has more to say and, writing...

Feb 26, 2018 — New York. He Who Gets Slapped (1924) screens this evening at Film Forum as part of the series Victor Sjöström: The Screen’s First Master. Lon Chaney “is brilliant as a man who has chosen madness over grief,” writes Jon Dieringer,...

Feb 24, 2018 — The International Jury of the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival—Tom Tykwer (president), Cécile de France, Chema Prado, Adele Romanski, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Stephanie Zacharek—has awarded the Golden Bear for Best Film in the Competition to Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not.Małgorzata...

Feb 15, 2018 — Think of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and pink pastels, purple uniforms, and the occasional splash of red may come to mind, offset by the ochres and faded wood grains of the scenes that frame the main story. Moonrise Kingdom...

Feb 7, 2018 — Last week, the SXSW Film Festival presented 132 features lined up for its 2018 edition running from March 9 through 18. Today, the festival announces that Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs will be this year’s Closing Night Film—and it’s added...

Feb 5, 2018 — The World of Apu is a new multi-lingual, bimonthly online film magazine whose first issue appeared last November. The new second issue features Rafaella Britto on Satyajit Ray’s “most gloomy film,” The Goddess (1960), K Balamurugan on Shanjey Kumar Perumal’s...

Jan 25, 2018 — “I don’t scare easily,” begins A. A. Dowd at the A.V. Club. “So it’s a special kind of awful, a rare treat of sorts, when something comes along that actually gets past my defenses, that does more than make me...

Jan 17, 2018 — “My appreciation for his inspiring and innovative cinema grows deeper as the years go by,” writes Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa in an essay that Jonathan Rosenbaum’s posted on his site, “Reflections on Kiarostami’s Two-Way Mirrors.” A new and expanded edition of their...