A Simple Life

Dec 1, 2022 — During the production of our release of Amores perros in 2020, the film’s writer-director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, gave us a remarkable window into his creative process, showing us some of the dozens of note cards he’d used in planning scenes...

May 17, 2022 — Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

Mar 16, 2020 — This month we’re reading about Helen Scott, a liaison between Paris and Hollywood; Anna Karina’s novels; William Faulkner’s screenplays; and more.

Sep 13, 2019 — Nicholas Britell’s scores are so finely calibrated to the movies they inhabit that they become inextricable from the images on-screen. Whether it’s the staccato heartbeat of orchestral strings in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight or the mix of piano motifs and hip-hop...

Aug 20, 2018 — A haven for punks and drifters, 1980s downtown New York is captured in all its grit and romance in Susan Seidelman’s Palme d’Or–nominated debut feature.

Jun 21, 2018 — I have lost count of the number of times I have had the pleasure of watching El Sur, but I suspect it is among the films I have seen most frequently in my life. It is a treasure chest that reveals...

Apr 27, 2018 — A survey of the films in this year’s Cannes competition lineup and predictions of what will take home the top prize.

Jul 11, 2017 — A forged note brings chaos and corruption to the lives of everyone it touches in Robert Bresson’s devastating final film.

Oct 4, 2016 — This account of a visit to the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls set is excerpted from an issue of the University of California, Los Angeles, newspaper.

Jun 21, 2016 — Animated in Czechoslovakia amid a Soviet invasion, the French film Fantastic Planet, the third collaboration between René Laloux and Roland Topor, timelessly renders its surreal sci-fi story of captivity and resistance.