The First Time

Jan 30, 2020 — Elisabeth Moss plays Shirley Jackson, but Decker’s fourth feature is anything but a conventional biopic.

May 17, 2019 — Ly’s fiery fiction feature debut alludes not only to Hugo but also to Fuqua, Kassovitz, and Spike Lee.

May 16, 2019 — All week long, writers have been reminding us that there was more to Doris Day than sweet sunshine.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Apr 14, 2018 — La Repubblica’s Alessandra Vitali is among the many Italian journalists reporting on today’s passing of Vittorio Taviani at the age of eighty-eight. In 2013, Ryan Gilbey, writing for the Guardian, declared that Taviani and his brother, Paolo, eighty-six, “are among...

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...

Apr 2, 2018 — This week sees the openings of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Locarno in Los Angeles, and DOC10 in Chicago, and I’ll have separate entries on all three events in a couple of days. New York. The BAMcinématek series Tough...

Mar 15, 2018 — In what Tim Adams, profiling Tacita Dean for the Guardian, calls “an unprecedented collaboration” between “three of the nation’s most prestigious institutions,” two exhibitions are opening in London today—Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery and Still Life at the National...

Feb 22, 2018 — Luis Buñuel was born on this day, February 22, in 1900. “By 1961, Buñuel was born again, so to speak,” writes Jeremy Carr, having sketched the career from Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930) through the years in...

Feb 20, 2018 — David Bordwell has revisited The Donovan Affair (1929), “Columbia’s first all-talking picture, and Frank Capra’s as well.” It’s “an unusually fluid early talkie” and studying it teaches us “some things about those transitional years 1928-1932, when filmmakers were figuring out...