The Theme

May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...

Dec 14, 2018 — “It’s sad to say, but women do not have much importance in westerns,” observed Anthony Mann, a master of the genre, in a 1957 Cahiers du cinéma interview. Made that same year, Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns begins with a whopper...

Dec 11, 2018 — Note: The terms black and white were part of the way racial categories were referred to in South Africa under apartheid. Other terms, like nonwhite and non-European, were also used to mark racial segregation. In the following essay, the term...

Apr 2, 2018 — Khalik Allah’s Black Mother premiered at last month’s True/False Film Fest, saw its international premiere at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, has just screened in Paris at the fortieth Cinéma du réel, and screens this week at New Directors/New Films in New...

Feb 14, 2018 — With her acclaimed new film Western opening in theaters this week, we spoke with German director Valeska Grisebach on the romantic ideals of the quintessential American genre.

Dec 11, 2017 — Before we delve into the city-by-city breakdown, lets note that, following its announcement late last month of its narrative and documentary feature film competition lineups, Slamdance has unveiled the lineups for its Beyond and Shorts programs. Slamdance 2018 will run...

Oct 17, 2017 — In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.

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 3, 2017 — In the print edition of the current issue of Film Comment, we find Luca Guadagnino saying that “the true generator of the movies I try to make is Jean Renoir, and A Day in the Country is really the alpha...

Oct 3, 2017 — From Catherine Grant comes word that the third issue of Film Journal is now online, and it’s got a theme: “Since the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La...