Up to a Certain Point

May 3, 2018 — Depth, beauty, curiosity—what gave luminous French star Danielle Darrieux staying power across eight decades? Critic Farran Smith Nehme looks for the answer in two films from opposite ends of her career.

Nov 21, 2017 — Terry Gilliam plunges into the filth and absurdity of medieval England with this grim fairy-tale comedy.

Oct 6, 2017 — Back when Projections was still called “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival described its program as a “yearly touchstone for experimental film.” Now neither of those terms—“avant-garde” and “experimental”—are quite broad enough to encompass all that goes...

Jun 20, 2017 — “Bertrand Tavernier joins a growing list of filmmakers who've made what amounts to an epic video essay with My Journey Through French Cinema, a three-hour-plus leap into notable French filmmaking from roughly 1930 to 1980,” writes Clayton Dillard at Slant....

Jun 22, 2016 — In honor of the semicentennial anniversary of Kartemquin Films, the influential documentarian discusses his groundbreaking, Kartemquin-produced 1994 film Hoop Dreams, what his work with the company has meant for him, and how Kartemquin has grown over the past fifty years.

Jul 19, 2011 — In May 1956, an Indian film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t well attended. The Indian delegation had done little to promote it, arranging only a single midnight screening that clashed with a party in honor of...

May 10, 2011 — Something Wild asks the eternal question “What makes us happy?” But the answer it proposes is far from easily arrived at. It’s a boy meets girl story, certainly, but one that goes much deeper with that narrative than most films...

Aug 9, 2010 — Now that Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb is fifteen years old, it seems pretty safe to say that it has evolved from a potential classic to actually being one. But what kind? A documentary portrait of a comic-book artist, musician, and nerdy...

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Mar 17, 2008 — During the Second World War, when Hiroshi Teshigahara was a schoolboy, Japan’s cities—above all his hometown, Tokyo—were mercilessly firebombed. He, and his future associates in countless artistic undertakings, returned to a landscape of bleak ruins. The adolescent Hiroshi was particularly...