Luminous People

Apr 2, 2020 — Artforum and Bookforum join Filmmaker and Film Quarterly in offering free access to their latest issues.

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Oct 10, 2019 — Dark Passages Where the sea and the city meet, they corrupt each other. Around docks, the ocean’s margins are scummy with oil and floating garbage; the water corrodes hulls, encrusts pilings, and slimes steps. Ports cater to men who come...

Oct 7, 2019 — Critics respond to the New York Film Festival’s selection of new moving image art.

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

Jun 18, 2019 — Bruno Dumont’s remarkable first feature examines the intermingling of the sacred and the profane in the French provinces.

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

May 21, 2019 — Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) is one of the great films about middle-aged loneliness, specifically—though not exclusively—as women feel it. It’s not a dating movie, though there’s dating in it. And it’s not a feeling-sorry-for-oneself movie, though there are...

Nov 18, 2018 — This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

Aug 8, 2018 — The concrete bunker looms up surreally from the rolling green countryside, a huge brutalist fortress sprouting from a hillside thick with wildflowers. This is the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, also known as the Packard...