From the Ground Up

Jan 30, 2018 — In his first sound film, silent-era master G. W. Pabst captures both the familial camaraderie and everyday brutality of life in the trenches.

Jan 26, 2018 — We turn first to IndieWire’s David Ehrlich: “‘The emotions you are having are not your own, they are someone else’s. You are not the cat—you are inside the cat.’ So begins Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, an ecstatically disorienting experience that...

Jan 24, 2018 — Wildlife, an adaptation of Richard Ford’s 1990 novel, “finds Paul Dano transporting his usual reserve as a performer (bellowing country preachers excepted) from one side of the camera to the other,” writes the A.V. Club’s A. A. Dowd. “Set in...

Jan 22, 2018 — “The last time Debra Granik had a film at Sundance, it was the masterful Ozark coming-of-age thriller Winter’s Bone, which won Oscar nominations and introduced the world to a certain young actress named Jennifer Lawrence.” Bilge Ebiri in the Village...

Jan 20, 2018 — “American Animals is nothing if not a movie that arrives at some very simple truths in the hardest way possible,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. “A slick, well-acted, and intensely self-reflexive docudrama from the director of The Impostor, [Bart] Layton’s first...

Jan 19, 2018 — “Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), the beleaguered bohemian-geek couple at the center of Private Life, have been trying, through fertility treatments, to get pregnant for years,” begins Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. Private Life “is a comedy of fragile hopes...

Dec 22, 2017 — “There are two basic types of Errol Morris film,” writes Evan Kindley in the Nation: One is the character study of an obsessive individual pursuing a difficult, perhaps impossible goal. Morris loves his Ahabs: the animal-obsessed eccentrics of Fast, Cheap...

Dec 6, 2017 — David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return has not only been voted up to the #2 slot in Sight & Sound’s “best films of 2017” poll of 188 international critics and curators, it’s also come out on the...

Nov 29, 2017 — The National Board of Review, established in 1909 and now boasting over 100 members, has named Steven Spielberg’s The Post as the best film of 2017. The Post won’t open until December 22 and reviews are embargoed until this coming...

Nov 21, 2017 — Ernst Lubitsch’s “world is defined by time as much as place,” writes Daniel Witkin in the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time. “Anachronistically straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, his characters embody unfashionable virtues of discretion and tact...