Work It

Oct 12, 2017 — The Chicago International Film Festival opens tonight with Reginald Hudlin’s Marshall and runs through October 26, when it closes with Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which won the Golden Lion in Venice (reviews).“Some biopics go for sweeping 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 11, 2017 — In his final completed feature, Orson Welles reflects on making Othello and the enduring eminence of Shakespeare.

Oct 10, 2017 — New York. “It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the Museum of Modern Art would screen a film series called Black Intimacy mere months after the Academy Awards had three films in its Best Picture category—Fences, Hidden Figures, and eventual winner Moonlight—that mostly focused on intimate...

Oct 10, 2017 — Mia Hansen-Løve is about to begin shooting her sixth feature, Maya, featuring Roman Kolinka (who's worked with Hansen-Løve on Eden, andThings to Come), Aarshi Banerjee, Alex Descas, Judith Chemla, and Johanna ter Steege. Fabien Lemercier reports for Cineuropa: “Written by...

Oct 9, 2017 — “Jeanne (Esther Garrel) crouches in an alleyway at night, her face a fountain of tears,” begins Carson Lund at Slant. “She’s just been dumped by Matéo (Paul Toucang) and kicked out of their shared Paris apartment. Seeking refuge, she walks...

Oct 7, 2017 — “Claire Denis’s new film, Let the Sun Shine In, about a middle-aged woman’s romantic adventures, refracts personal experience in the form of a modernistic screwball comedy,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Juliette Binoche brings luminous intensity and wicked humor...

Oct 7, 2017 — We begin with Angelo Muredda, writing for Cinema Scope: “Joachim Trier makes a sterling if somewhat noncommittal bid for post-horror with Thelma, a slow-burn supernatural thriller about a Norwegian teen (Eili Harboe) who goes away to college (and away from...

Oct 6, 2017 — Kevin Jerome Everson has a nine-minute short screening as part of Projections’ Program 1: Speculative Spaces at the New York Film Festival. In IFO, “which stands for ‘Identified Flying Object,’ African Americans look up at the skies and report alien...

Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...