This Is Not a Film

Aug 9, 2017 — New York. “Though Fire Island is the movie’s very recognizable locale, it is filmed in arcadianly remote aspects of sunlight, shade and water, and narrated simply on the solemn, picturesque, stark level of myth. . . . The world as...

Aug 7, 2017 — Todd Haynes is working on a documentary about the Velvet Underground, reports Variety’s John Hopewell. Speaking in Locarno, where he’s receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor for career achievement, Haynes says that he’ll “rely certainly on Warhol films but also a...

Aug 6, 2017 — “First there is the darkness of a limestone mine, lit only by helmet flashlights and the occasional shower of flinty sparks from a pickax connecting with rock,” begins Jessica Kiang in Variety. “And then there’s the comparative dazzle of the...

Aug 4, 2017 — Olivier Assayas’s next project is E-book, a “full-blown comedy” starring starring Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Christa Theret and Pascal Gregory, report John Hopewell and Emiliano Granada for Variety. In Locarno, where he’s currently presiding over the competition jury,...

Jul 19, 2017 — Todd Haynes will receive the Pardo d’onore Manor, the Locarno Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award, on August 7. The festival will also screen Haynes’s 1991 film Poison (image above). Jean-Marie Straub will receive his Pardo d’onore Manor on August 11.For...

Jul 12, 2017 — New York. A retrospective of films by Alain Tanner opens today at the Metrograph and runs through July 23. Writing for Hyperallergic, Craig Hubert looks back on work Tanner did with the late critic, novelist, painter, and poet John Berger,...

Jul 9, 2017 — New York. “It’s Great to Be Alive may not be the nuttiest Hollywood musical of 1933—a year that brought the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup—but it’s surely the only one to end with a production number in which the women of...

Jun 29, 2017 — Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel In a Lonely Place, “about a World War II flyboy, now a serial rapist and murderer, would have violated just about every commandment in the Production Code,” had Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt stuck...

Jun 27, 2017 — Let’s break the pattern a bit and open today’s entry with the recommended listening first. Karina Longworth’s outstanding podcast You Must Remember This has just returned from a well-deserved hiatus with a new series, “Jean and Jane.” As in Seberg...

Jun 20, 2017 — At the dawn of sound cinema, French theater titan Marcel Pagnol immortalized his epic vision of his native Provence in three exquisite humanist dramas.