Pioneer

Apr 4, 2018 — The sixty-first San Francisco International Film Festival opens tonight with Silas Howard’s A Kid Like Jake, and when it premiered at Sundance, IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called it “very much a ‘White People Problems’ movie, but it’s also a lot more...

Mar 19, 2018 — New York. On Friday and Saturday, Anthology Film Archives pairs Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black (1962) and Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). As Jeva Lange notes at Screen Slate, House “was shot at a leper colony...

Mar 16, 2018 — In a new documentary on FilmStruck, composer and sound recordist Bo Harwood discusses his close collaboration with John Cassavetes and the music he composed for six of his films.

Mar 15, 2018 — New York. Film Forum’s series, entitled simply Michel Piccoli, opens tomorrow and runs through March 22. “It’s surprisingly hard to think of an American equivalent for Piccoli,” writes Mike D’Angelo in the Village Voice. “He never exudes the wised-up, electrifying...

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...

Jan 25, 2018 — “Few filmmakers earn the adjective ‘offbeat’ as definitively as the Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, whose new Western (premiering at Sundance), Damsel, is a goof on the genre in which no trope is left unmolested and nothing goes the way...

Jan 24, 2018 — We begin with Rolling Stone’s David Fear: “Pick any random song by the Coup—we suggest ‘Fat Cats, Bigga Fish’ from their 1994 album Genocide & Juice, or ‘My Favorite Mutiny’ from 2006’s Pick a Bigger Weapon—and you'll get complex anti-corporate...

Jan 15, 2018 — On Saturday, Fireflies founding editors Annabel Brady-Brown and Giovanni Marchini Camia will launch Issue 5 at Wolf Studio in Berlin. The event will feature live performances from artists Sam Smith (video), Puck Vonk (sound), and Eli Cortiñas (lecture), all of...

Jan 6, 2018 — We begin this round on the best of 2017 with awards, because the National Society of Film Critics has just announced theirs. Forty-four of the Society’s fifty-nine members have cast ballots, and the majority of them are champions of Greta...

Dec 27, 2017 — Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost some writers who’ve made unique contributions to film criticism. At Film Studies for Free, Catherine Grant has posted an entry in memory of “radical film and media scholar” Chuck Kleinhans. “Along with...