To Be and to Have

Oct 16, 2019 — Deep Dives “I have a feeling that the really crucial moments in a film should be wordless,” the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray once said. He was speaking of his 1964 masterpiece Charulata, whose action consists largely of soulful looks passing...

May 22, 2019 — Most critics won’t allow a comically absurd premise or a convoluted plot stand in the way of a good time.

May 21, 2019 — Malick’s rendering of the true story of a conscientious objector has split the critics.

Mar 28, 2019 — Flashbacks No filmmaker of his generation from Eastern Europe could match the charisma and originality of Dušan Makavejev. Forever bustling from festival to festival with his inspiring wife Bojana Marijan—who contributed to the sound and music on many of his...

Dec 28, 2018 — Ulysses S. Jenkins’s Two-Zone Transfer By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about...

Nov 20, 2018 — A sampling of reviews of some of the most significant movies currently in theaters.

Aug 9, 2018 — World War II tears a young couple apart in the Palme d’Or–winning drama The Cranes Are Flying, playing on Sunday at Bard College.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Jan 20, 2018 — “In the near-decade since Dogtooth gnawed its way into viewers’ imaginations,” begins Guy Lodge in Variety, “the words ‘Greek comedy’ have come to mean something nearly as distinct as ‘Greek tragedy’ to arthouse audiences—just not always distinct from Greek tragedy,...

Dec 17, 2017 — “He’s joking all the time if he feels he has an audience,” Barbet Schroeder said of Idi Amin in a 1976 New York Post interview.I think we know the type.Ugandan dictator Amin, the subject of Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A...