The Friend of the Family

May 27, 2021 — First Person I first watched Yi Yi on a busted cassette tape, in my small Texas town, rented from a Blockbuster behind a rice field and a pharmacy. If you were a high schooler growing up just outside of Houston...

Oct 20, 2020 — At the start of The Gunfighter, Jimmy Ringo is a man with eleven kills to his name, soon to be twelve. But the only place he actually appears to be very violent, or even very vital, is in other people’s...

Mar 6, 2020 — Above photo: © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLCIn America, black musical genius has never been in short supply, though it hasn’t always been recognized or fairly compensated. Even a casual glance at the résumé of formally trained composer, producer, and arranger...

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

Nov 9, 2017 — “DOC NYC started in 2010 and is now, at 250 movies and dozens of filmmaker workshops (best in class: ‘Show Me the Money Day’) spread over eight days [November 9 through 16], the biggest and probably best one-stop venue for...

Oct 9, 2017 — “Jeanne (Esther Garrel) crouches in an alleyway at night, her face a fountain of tears,” begins Carson Lund at Slant. “She’s just been dumped by Matéo (Paul Toucang) and kicked out of their shared Paris apartment. Seeking refuge, she walks...

Nov 18, 2016 — Artists across all mediums have long been obsessed with the challenge of evoking dream states, but film—with its oneiric combinations of light and shadow, and its ability to manipulate time and space—has particularly uncanny access to our nighttime reveries. Whether...

Nov 23, 2008 — The possession of a real voice is always a marvel, an almost religious thing.

Nov 4, 2014 — In cinema history, there truly is no gag like a Tati gag.

Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...