The Notebook

Feb 28, 2018 — A few days ago, we ran an essay here by Pico Iyer on Satyajit Ray’s The Hero (1966), followed by Meheli Sen’s comments on Uttam Kumar’s performance within the context of his stardom. Iyer has more to say and, writing...

Feb 28, 2018 — New York. Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema opens tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Sunday. Writing for the Notebook, Ela Bittencourt points out that “a number of films stand out for either their carefully...

Feb 27, 2018 — “Orson Welles, a boy from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was one of the most audacious Shakespearians who ever lived,” writes Robert Horton. “He recited soliloquies as a child, wrote a book on the plays as a teenager, and at age seventeen roamed...

Feb 24, 2018 — Starting yesterday, and on through Wednesday, Anthology Film Archives in New York is presenting a series curated by Steve Erickson, Documentary, Iranian Style: The Films of Mehrdad Oskouei. “It’s about as essential a film series as I can imagine,” writes...

Feb 22, 2018 — Luis Buñuel was born on this day, February 22, in 1900. “By 1961, Buñuel was born again, so to speak,” writes Jeremy Carr, having sketched the career from Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930) through the years in...

Feb 20, 2018 — David Bordwell has revisited The Donovan Affair (1929), “Columbia’s first all-talking picture, and Frank Capra’s as well.” It’s “an unusually fluid early talkie” and studying it teaches us “some things about those transitional years 1928-1932, when filmmakers were figuring out...

Feb 16, 2018 — “The responsibility of being a gay film critic,” writes Michael Koresky, “to borrow a phrase from the great Robin Wood, is to be honest about your responses as an individualized viewer, and to balance questions around identity with a film’s...

Feb 15, 2018 — Think of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and pink pastels, purple uniforms, and the occasional splash of red may come to mind, offset by the ochres and faded wood grains of the scenes that frame the main story. Moonrise Kingdom...

Feb 13, 2018 — Lucrecia Martel was at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year not only to present Zama but also to deliver a masterclass. Giovanni Marchini Camia was there, and reports for Filmmaker: To illustrate her conception of mise en scène, Martel...

Feb 12, 2018 — In “Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?,” a four-part essay at Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton first stakes out a position. Referring to one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous pieces, he writes: “For a hundred years now it’s been...