The First Year

Aug 30, 2017 — “You could argue that [Janicza Bravo’s] Lemon thinks too much about its own face, its style over its substance,” writes Niela Orr for the Baffler, “but it does so in service of its critique of white male narcissism. To this...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...

Aug 21, 2017 — When Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas fled Lithuania in 1944 only to land in a Nazi forced-labor camp, Jonas began to keep a diary. Entries from that diary are gathered in I Had Nowhere to Go, out now from...

Aug 11, 2017 — With his controversial new film Nocturama opening in theaters, French director Bertrand Bonello spoke with us about what inspires him as an artist and how he blurs the line between realism and abstraction.

Aug 4, 2017 — “In an unusual bit of programming synchronicity,” writes Ben Kenigsberg in the New York Times, “IFC Center will show High Plains Drifter—one of Clint Eastwood’s earliest directorial efforts, in which he casts himself as an amoral stranger who agrees to...

Jul 20, 2017 — Director Ken Loach and his longtime screenwriting partner Paul Laverty, recipients of this year’s Crystal Globe award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, speak about the complex relationship between politics and cinema.

Jul 17, 2017 — “Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a...

Jul 14, 2017 — Catherine Grant tips us off to Leo Robson’s interview with David Thomson for the January 2017 issue of the White Review. “Hawks is still for me the essential American director of the golden age,” says Thomson, and the conversation’s an...

Jul 13, 2017 — “The spirit of Seijun Suzuki, patron saint of avant-garde Japanese filmmakers, presides over the Japan Society's 11th annual Japan Cuts program, a consistently exciting survey of innovative Nipponese cinema,” writes Simon Abrams at the top of his preview for RogerEbert.com....

Jun 7, 2017 — The Spanish filmmaker, whose short film Mystery is featured on the Criterion Channel, discusses his love for Luis Buñuel and the influence of Catholicism on his worldview.