Past Lives

Mar 26, 2021 — In her hypnotic, uncategorizable films, the director serves as a channel for images that emerge from deep within her unconscious.

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Feb 26, 2021 — There would be no Indonesian cinema without Usmar Ismail (1921–71). His third feature, The Long March (Darah dan doa, 1950), was not only the first film to be produced by a fully Indonesian crew and production company but also one...

Feb 26, 2021 — Besides Abbas Kiarostami, Rebecca Hall, and Djibril Diop Mambéty, we’re also reading about TikTok and the greatest movie endings ever.

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Feb 12, 2021 — The virtual first half of this year’s festival will premiere new work from Céline Sciamma, Hong Sangsoo, Dominik Graf, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

Jan 27, 2021 — Since launching in 2016, the Digital Transgender Archive has functioned as an international collaboration among more than sixty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections. Gathering a wide range of trans-related materials, including photos, magazines, newspaper clippings, and newsletters,...

Jan 27, 2021 — A film that centers on a transgender person or storyline enters the culture like any other movie. The difference lies in the discourse around it. A pervasive disregard for the realities of trans experience beyond the screen is evident in...

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...