Benjy

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...

Oct 12, 2017 — “In my undergraduate years, I watched three films almost every day,” Wang Bing, director most recently of the Golden Leopard-winning Mrs. Fang, tells Zoe Meng Jiang. “I’m from the same generation as the Sixth Generation filmmakers like Wang Xiaoshuai and...

Oct 12, 2017 — Last week, after years of rumors and aborted attempts to bring it to light, Hollywood’s “open secret” finally became a story fit to print. On Thursday, October 5, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times that...

Oct 6, 2017 — Back when Projections was still called “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival described its program as a “yearly touchstone for experimental film.” Now neither of those terms—“avant-garde” and “experimental”—are quite broad enough to encompass all that goes...

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 28, 2017 — “If you’ve never seen The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama about three Navy sailors on a debauched and ultimately tragic road trip, there are several reasons to rectify that,” begins Dana Stevens at Slate. “There’s a devilishly charismatic performance...

Sep 27, 2017 — The fifty-fifth edition of the New York Film Festival opens tomorrow and runs through October 15. In his latest “Cinema ’67 Revisited” column for Film Comment, Mark Harris looks back at the fifth edition, noting that “Susan Sontag began her...

Sep 17, 2017 — “Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It,” declares Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s...

Sep 11, 2017 — Just as the weekend began, Variety’s Cynthia Littleton and Daniel Holloway broke the news that Amazon had ordered up a rather remarkable round of new series.Wong Kar-wai will direct Tong Wars, “an hour-long drama written and executive produced by Paul...

Sep 6, 2017 — “Murray Lerner, a seminal music documentary filmmaker of the 60s and 70s, has died at age 90 in New York City,” reports Paula Parisi for Variety. “Lerner won an Oscar for best documentary in 1981 for From Mozart to Mao:...