† This is the Life

May 15, 2000 — Horror movies take place in their own territory. The trick is to get us there. It doesn’t matter whether they start with fantastic premises and gothic settings, or with ordinary neighborhoods and daily experience, because the places and assumptions change...

Apr 24, 2000 — When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming. Only the people and places of the dream matter. I have difficulty making contact with others, as one does when half-asleep. If a person is asleep...

Nov 11, 1991 — The following notes are by Mark Kasdan, co-writer and associate producer of Silverado. Albert Camus wrote that a person’s lifework may be “nothing but a long journey to find again, by all the detours of art, the two or three...

Aug 20, 2001 — I have known Torben Skjødt since 1983. His debut video Englefjæs—which I thought to be very accomplished—was presented during a film week in Silkeborg. A debut work, yes, but made with a self-assured maturity by a self-taught creator of images....

Jul 2, 2024 — Self-destruction is not only an aesthetic but its own subject matter in Sam Peckinpah’s deeply elegiac western, a towering masterpiece that examines American power and greed.

Jun 25, 2024 — Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

May 6, 2024 — Perhaps the most hard-to-categorize of the great Hollywood studios came into its own with a string of critically acclaimed films based on popular books and plays, including Born Yesterday, A Raisin in the Sun, and From Here to Eternity.

Mar 15, 2024 — Brussels celebrates Chantal Akerman, Hirokazu Kore-eda remembers Ryuichi Sakamoto, and there are some intriguing projects in the works.

Nov 1, 2023 — Sandra Hüller meets Joachim Trier, Hayao Miyazaki predicts the future, and MoMA showcases Iranian cinema.

Mar 17, 2023 — This week: Good news from repertory programmers, new columns, and a talk with Louis Garrel.