In Celebration

Sep 29, 2021 — It’s National Silent Movie Day—and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival opens on Saturday.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films Come on now, honey sugarYou know your baby loveYou know just the other dayI was gonna take you to go see a movieSweet Sweetback . . . Stevie Wonder, “Sweet Little Girl,” 1972 We went...

Aug 25, 2021 — Fifteen features and eight programs of short films are set for the festival’s showcase of aesthetically adventurous work.

Jul 30, 2021 — First: conscious neglect and budget cuts are threatening cinema’s legacy. Then: this week’s highlights.

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

May 19, 2021 — A confession: before I made my first trip, a few years ago, to the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, I had seen precious little Indigenous cinema. The average cinephile in the West watches predominantly films made by...

Mar 31, 2021 — It has seemed to me for a long time that there is far too little screaming about Albert Brooks. It has seemed that way to all of his staunchest fans, who secretly relish being among the evolved few who know...

Mar 26, 2021 — Today’s round features writing on Catherine Breillat, William Greaves, Thom Andersen, and Patricia Highsmith.

Mar 9, 2021 — “Oral tradition is a tradition of images. What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in direct...

Jan 5, 2021 — The director overcame anti-Semitism or misogyny to make such unique films as Hester Street and Chilly Scenes of Winter.