The Work

Mar 12, 2018 — When the SXSW Film Festival presented the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One last night, “technical difficulties KO’ed the sound for the second time in a row, bringing the dizzying, VFX-fueled video game adventure to a grinding halt...

Feb 18, 2018 — “Nymphetmania has a long and hoary pedigree in Hollywood, and flourished years before Nabokov gave us the Lolita syndrome,” writes Molly Haskell in the Guardian. “D. W. Griffith’s child-woman ingénues such as Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh were ‘pseudo-nymphets’ (critic...

Feb 9, 2018 — New York. Tonight at Light Industry, Tobi Haslett will introduce a screening in memory of the late Mark E. Smith. “Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan [1986; image above] now looks like a glinting frieze from a vanished London, a...

Jan 20, 2018 — We begin with April Wolfe, writing for Film Comment and introducing us to Maxim Pozdorovkin and Our New President, which “tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, constructed almost...

Dec 1, 2017 — New York. Gothi(c), a series running throughout December at the Metrograph, “traces the cinematic evolution from the Gothic (represented by such films as Bride of Frankenstein and Rebecca, both showing Sunday, and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, based on a Henry...

Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...

Oct 19, 2017 — New York. “Feverish, fragmented, expressionistic, The Sin of Nora Moran (1933) is one of the most formally daring films to come out of Hollywood in the early sound era,” begins Imogen Sara Smith in her overview for Film Comment of...

Sep 6, 2017 — “Murray Lerner, a seminal music documentary filmmaker of the 60s and 70s, has died at age 90 in New York City,” reports Paula Parisi for Variety. “Lerner won an Oscar for best documentary in 1981 for From Mozart to Mao:...

Sep 6, 2017 — New York. Back in April, Film Forum presented The Complete Wiseman: Part 1: Early Wiseman, the first half of a Frederick Wiseman retrospective that, as Matt Prigge notes in the Village Voice, “covered the prolific and pioneering documentarian’s angriest period.”...

Sep 4, 2017 — “Greta Gerwig didn’t get much sleep leading up to the Friday premiere of her directorial debut, the coming-of-age dramedy Lady Bird, at the Telluride Film Festival,” writes Josh Rottenberg, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for the Los Angeles Times....