Hard to Be a God

Aug 6, 2025 — The festival selects thirty-four features including world premieres and the best from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto.

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Nov 20, 2020 — Standing before his friend Basil Hallward’s portrait of him, the paint barely dry, Dorian Gray implores to some unseen force: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old . ....

Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.

Mar 8, 2016 — Paris Belongs to Us marked the genesis of Jacques Rivette’s unique filmmaking style—introducing visual and narrative elements that Rivette would build on over the course of his long career.

Apr 20, 2026 — For half a century, she was, as Emmanuel Macron put it, “a constant presence in French cinema.”

Feb 13, 2026 — This week brings a tribute to Diane Keaton, notes on Taxi Driver at fifty, and three flights of the spirit.

Oct 16, 2025 — Vivacious and winning in comedies, she also brought a fierce power to her dramatic roles.

Mar 14, 2019 — As a new collection of Tarkovsky’s writing is released, the Close-Up Film Centre presents presents side-by-side series of work by the two friends.

Nov 18, 2015 — Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood applied cinematic specificity and flair to the literary realism of Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel.”