The Big Cat

Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.

Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.

Dec 9, 2002 — What makes Jean-Luc Godard’s classic so unique a viewing experience today, even more than in 1963, is the way it stimulates an audience’s intelligence as well as its senses.

Apr 11, 2024 — Anticipation builds for new work from Jia Zhangke, Francis Ford Coppola, Andrea Arnold, and David Cronenberg.

Jul 22, 2021 — Quentin Tarantino’s first novel and studies of Ophuls and Melville are among this month’s new and noteworthy titles.

Feb 18, 2018 — “Nymphetmania has a long and hoary pedigree in Hollywood, and flourished years before Nabokov gave us the Lolita syndrome,” writes Molly Haskell in the Guardian. “D. W. Griffith’s child-woman ingénues such as Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh were ‘pseudo-nymphets’ (critic...

Oct 31, 2017 — In the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time, Julien Allen proposes that “perhaps the most compelling display of Hitchcock’s bravura in Psycho [1960] occurs during one of its least discussed sequences, in which Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) cleans...

Oct 28, 2017 — We begin with a few translations. Asymptote lives up to its own billing as “the premier site for world literature in translation” with the presentation of Adam Kuplowsky’s renderings in English of some observational work by Yasujiro Ozu. “These three...

Oct 2, 2017 — Vulture has polled more than forty working screenwriters—their names and credits are listed—to come up with an annotated list of the “100 Best Screenwriters of All Time.” David Edelstein’s written the entry on the legend who’s landed at the top,...

Sep 5, 2017 — Frederick Wiseman “is 87 now,” as Tom Charity notes in the new issue of Cinema Scope. “It may be a little presumptuous to suggest he’s reaching for a summation, but it is sure that he’s only making the films he...