The First Time

Aug 19, 2019 — The early days of the talkie were certainly a sensational time for the movies, as Hollywood didn’t shy away from portraying all manner of debauchery on-screen. And no star better embodies this bawdy, brassy period before the enforcement of the...

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...

Jun 10, 2019 — The growing presence of unabashed queerness in contemporary culture makes the past seem comparatively drained of it. But it was always there. There’s often a queer history that lies beneath our accepted mainstream hetero narratives. When excavated, these histories can...

Feb 1, 2019 — Rotterdam and Vanity Fair get a cinephile’s dream roster of filmmakers talking about their work.

Nov 14, 2018 — He transformed a fledgling comic book publisher into a juggernaut brand.

Oct 4, 2018 — A “skeleton key” to an epic audiovisual essay by Godard and interviews with Anna Biller and Richard Linklater are among this week’s highlights.

Sep 4, 2018 — Natalie Portman sings, Willem Dafoe paints, and Frederick Wiseman heads to Trump country.

May 4, 2018 — What do we mean when we say a narrative film is poetic? The answer lies in this visionary western from director Jim Jarmusch.

Apr 26, 2018 — In the Year of the Pig (1968) With the fiftieth anniversary of the May ’68 upheaval weighing so heavily on the cultural hive mind at the moment, now’s the perfect time for a retrospective of work by the radical director...

Apr 20, 2018 — “Jiri Trnka didn’t craft his puppet-cartoon shorts and features merely to imitate life,” writes Michael Sragow for Film Comment. “His endlessly original and inventive movies incorporate life, or transcend it. Trnka insisted that he was ‘local,’ and drew many of...