Life Is Life

Aug 9, 2017 — “A prodigal son’s Palestinian homecoming is marked by family obligations, comforting white lies and concerted efforts at matchmaking in Wajib, a wryly-observed family drama from writer/director Annemarie Jacir,” begins Screen’s Alan Hunter. “Loosely inspired by events in her own family,...

Aug 8, 2017 — The disheveled drifter at the heart of Mike Leigh’s 1993 masterpiece collides with a disturbed young man in this brilliantly acted, semi-screwball scene.

Aug 8, 2017 — “The gaffers and grips, the electricians and sound men, all the technicians begin to mill about briskly on the thick-sodded grass adjacent to the ice-rimed children’s wading pool. Even the park’s casual strollers, walking their diarrheic poodles and mastiffs, begin...

Aug 8, 2017 — This underappreciated highlight of Michael Curtiz’s filmography grapples with postwar disillusionment and marital strife through the prism of a daylight noir.

Aug 7, 2017 — The big news to catch up with here is the launch of Film Critic: Adrian Martin, “almost 20 years, on and off, in the making.” Adrian Martin has been writing essential film criticism for four decades now, and what’s collected...

Aug 4, 2017 — Olivier Assayas’s next project is E-book, a “full-blown comedy” starring starring Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Christa Theret and Pascal Gregory, report John Hopewell and Emiliano Granada for Variety. In Locarno, where he’s currently presiding over the competition jury,...

Aug 2, 2017 — “Jonathan Demme loved people,” begins Matt Prigge, writing for Metro US. “There are villains in his movies—most notably that charming aesthete Hannibal Lecter, who loved people, too, only as food. And his biggest hits were about strife: the hunt for...

Aug 2, 2017 — As Richard Misek explains in his introduction, the new “special issue of [in]Transition forms part of a collaborative project inspired by” the collection Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, edited by Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit....

Jul 27, 2017 — Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbara has presented the lineup for the seventy-fourth edition (August 30 through September 9) at a press conference in Rome. I’ve gathered notes and trailers.CompetitionAi Weiwei’s Human Flow. From the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel:...

Jul 26, 2017 — “The rarely screened Le gai savoir (1969), translated as ‘Joy of Knowing’ in the 2K restoration that makes its world premiere at the Quad on Friday, exemplifies a typical Godardian paradox,” writes Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice. “Profuse and...