This Is Not a Film

Oct 25, 2019 — This week we’re reading about Kira Muratova, The Uninvited, and The Wizard of Oz, and we’re listening in on Martin Scorsese and Kevin Jerome Everson.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Feb 1, 1999 — Rob Reiner’s directorial debut documents a recent moment in the band’s checkered history—one that only coincidentally represents a brief decline in the sine wave of their careers.

Apr 10, 2026 — Jia Zhang-Ke and Steven Soderbergh experiment with AI, plus: Jim Jarmusch, Tina Aumont, and Elvira Notari.

Mar 19, 2026 — To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of VHS, the director and the editor of Videoheaven discuss how this game-changing format shaped their lives and imaginations and left a seismic impact on the film industry.

Sep 22, 2025 — The director of the documentary Celluloid Underground discusses his life as a curator, Iranian film culture, and the inherent ephemerality of cinema.

Mar 13, 2025 — While a film’s stars are forced to bear the responsibility of moving a narrative forward, supporting actors get to have fun providing comic relief or suggesting whole lives being lived beyond the screen.

Jul 6, 2021 — The fourth of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seven features is his most oneiric and resistant to interpretation, drawing from the director’s own childhood memories to create a fluid sense of history.

Dec 18, 2020 — From Marlene Dietrich to Tsai Ming-liang, it’s a varied and wide-ranging bunch this week.

Jan 7, 2019 — The artist behind our new cover for Hitchcock’s spy-noir masterwork remembers falling in love with the film as a child and walks through the process of illustrating one of its most iconic scenes.