The Call

Nov 12, 2019 — The Daytrippers came out in theaters in 1997, back when I was in graduate school at NYU. That was a year when you could rent videotapes everywhere—at Blockbuster, but also at a Laundromat or a bodega. There were still phone booths...

Sep 5, 2019 — Critics split three ways: Joker is just plain great, or great but dangerous, or dangerous and also really quite bad.

Aug 2, 2019 — Extraordinarily long movies, challenging movies, and even ugly movies figure into this week’s round.

Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...

Jul 2, 2019 — Father-child relationships come into focus in this week’s Short and Feature pairing on the Criterion Channel, which examines the trauma of coming of age with an emotionally unstable parent. Presented with Víctor Erice’s El Sur, Charles Williams’s All These Creatures follows...

Jun 18, 2019 — In his idiosyncratic, award-winning second film, Bruno Dumont uses the story of an alienated police detective to investigate the most elemental aspects of human experience.

May 18, 2019 — Diop’s debut fiction feature is a love story, a detective story, and a ghost story.

Mar 1, 2019 — Claire Simon begins her new documentary The Competition with a shot of young filmmakers chatting outside the locked gates of La Fémis, the most prestigious film school in France, patiently awaiting an opportunity to be judged by a panel of...

Jan 22, 2019 — Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside...

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...