My First Film

Aug 17, 2020 — Louise Brooks, Oliver Stone, James Stewart, Andy Warhol, and more are here to help relieve this year’s summer doldrums.

Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...

Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda The poster for the seventy-second Cannes Film Festival, held in May 2019, used a photograph taken during the shooting of Agnès Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954. Wearing rolled-up trousers, a shirt,...

Aug 11, 2020 — I’ve often found that the most successful short films and short stories apply what Ernest Hemingway called the “iceberg theory,” distilling a larger narrative into a very specific moment that allows audiences to infer the bigger picture in their own...

Jul 6, 2020 — Songbook In the blue moonlight of a humid December night, an escape is underway. A man in army fatigues runs from an open-air cell with a rolled-up rug in one hand and a sword in the other, stolen from someone...

Jun 30, 2020 — Come and See (1985) is one of those films whose authority is established from its opening moments. Out in the open air, an elderly peasant dressed in a soft-peaked beret is volleying a mixture of threats and imprecations into some...

Jun 22, 2020 — Heartfelt tributes to the great British actor have been appearing since he passed away on Friday.

Jun 18, 2020 — When Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader made its theatrical premiere in July 2000, it was entering a queer political landscape vastly different from the one we live in today. Over the last two decades, we’ve witnessed the rise of LGBTQ...

Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...

Jun 15, 2020 — This month we’re looking at books on topics ranging from Japanese animation to Hollywood movie stars to jazz on the big screen.