The General

Aug 28, 2020 — One severe pan, a good handful of raves, and a set of fence-straddling reviews recommending that viewers go ahead and proceed—but with caution.

Aug 10, 2020 — A slyly feminist film by the only woman directing in the Hollywood studio system of her thirties-and-early-forties heyday, Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance stands as one of the era’s most groundbreaking—and entertaining—backstage sagas. And as it turned out, a different...

Aug 3, 2020 — Songbook “You’ve probably heard that one before, but what the hell. If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.” first spoken dialogue in Inside Llewyn Davis The coldest murder in the Coen Brothers...

Jun 27, 2019 — Sergei Bondarchuk pulled out all the stops to bring Tolstoy’s sprawling vision to the screen, and the result remains one of the most extravagant epic films of all time.

Jun 22, 2018 — Cinephiles converge in Bologna for nine days of discovery and conversation.

Apr 9, 2018 — The retrospective of work by Lucrecia Martel at the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be the first of many around the country and abroad in the coming weeks, so we’ll take a closer look in a separate entry on...

Feb 16, 2018 — “The responsibility of being a gay film critic,” writes Michael Koresky, “to borrow a phrase from the great Robin Wood, is to be honest about your responses as an individualized viewer, and to balance questions around identity with a film’s...

Dec 4, 2017 — The week begins with good news: Wes Anderson’s stop motion animated film Isle of Dogs will open the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival (February 15 through 25). As the Berlinale reminds us, this is “the story of Atari Kobayashi, twelve-year-old...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Since I saw Faces Places at its premiere at Cannes in May, [Agnès] Varda’s latest documentary has cemented itself on my running list of the year’s best titles,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Made with the French...

Aug 8, 2017 — In Jan Speckenbach’s “intriguing, sincere, if somewhat overreaching sophomore feature,” Freedom, “Nora (Johanna Wokalek) wanders past Breugel’s Tower of Babel painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, while in Berlin, unaware of her whereabouts, her lawyer husband Philip (a sympathetic...