A Year of School

Jul 29, 2024 — Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.

Oct 4, 2023 — Night has fallen in London, but the streets still teem with people. Through a second-story window, we watch as an elderly Jewish man who lives over a shop is stabbed to death and his rooms are set on fire. We...

Sep 8, 2023 — We’re celebrating Ousmane Sembène’s centennial, reading interviews with Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Kasi Lemmons, and watching soundies.

Jan 21, 2020 — The Mankiewicz brothers, Jonas Mekas, Werner Herzog, Sidney Lumet, and Ja’Tovia Gary all figure in this month’s roundup.

Apr 15, 2018 — La Semaine de la Critique, or Critics’ Week, has announced the lineup for its fifty-seventh edition, running from May 9 through 17 in Cannes. The opening film will be Paul Dano’s Wildlife, and I gathered a first round of reviews...

Apr 6, 2018 — Angela Schanelec’s films “represent the most innovative use of ‘conventional’ editing in narrative cinema since Pialat who, along with Bresson, has been a clear influence,” writes Michael Sicinski for the Notebook. “Schanelec’s contribution is what we might call the ‘epistemological...

Mar 28, 2018 — “Forty-seven years young,” writes the staff at Slant, “New Directors/New Films—programmed by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art—is an eclectic, geographically far-flung survey of bourgeoning filmmaking talent, and more than ever, this year’s lineup...

Aug 7, 2017 — The big news to catch up with here is the launch of Film Critic: Adrian Martin, “almost 20 years, on and off, in the making.” Adrian Martin has been writing essential film criticism for four decades now, and what’s collected...

Jun 30, 2017 — “Founded in 1946 and situated in the picturesque Czech spa town,” the “Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) is seen as one of the most prestigious events on the circuit,” writes Orlando Parfitt at the top of his preview of...

Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Astrid Hadad