To Have and Have Not

May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...

Apr 10, 2019 — One Scene Dušan Makavejev’s boundary-pushing 1974 film Sweet Movie gleefully skewers the forces of social oppression with a twisted double narrative and Day-Glo scenarios. At a time when the director’s native Yugoslavia was carving out a unique position somewhere between the political...

Mar 19, 2019 — A few weeks after Barbara Loden, the writer, director, and star of Wanda, died at age forty-eight after a long battle with cancer, Elia Kazan, her widower, was interviewed by Marguerite Duras for Cahiers du cinéma. It was 1980, and...

Sep 20, 2018 — One of the most respected film publications celebrates its anniversary with a forward-looking symposium.

Apr 17, 2018 — The past couple of days have seen lineup announcements from Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, and of course, last week, the main event, the Cannes Film Festival presented the bulk of its lineup for the seventy-first edition running from May...

Mar 23, 2018 — New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has rolled out the lineup for the fifth edition of Art of the Real, “an essential showcase for the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking.” The series will...

Oct 9, 2017 — “Jeanne (Esther Garrel) crouches in an alleyway at night, her face a fountain of tears,” begins Carson Lund at Slant. “She’s just been dumped by Matéo (Paul Toucang) and kicked out of their shared Paris apartment. Seeking refuge, she walks...

May 17, 2016 — For decades, celebrated Italian film composer Ennio Morricone has been lending his musical talents to directors from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Leone to Terrence Malick and Quentin Tarantino. In the latest installment of the Guardian’s weekly This Much I...

Jan 7, 2016 — At the gala for the New York Film Critics Circle’s 2016 awards dinner Criterion president Peter Becker accepted an award on behalf of his father, Criterion cofounder William Becker. His remarks are reproduced here.

Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.