La ley de deseo

May 6, 2021 — Fame, as the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once observed, is reductive. “Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished,” he wrote in 2666, an epic novel published after his death.What Bolaño identified as the...

Apr 16, 2021 — Few motifs in Indian cinema are as potent, as laden with history and meaning, as the train. In 1955’s Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray immortalized the railways as the symbol of an alienating modernity in a newly independent India; in a...

Apr 15, 2021 — Catherine Breillat and Todd Field are getting back behind the camera, while Scorsese and Spielberg forge ahead with their latest projects.

Apr 13, 2021 — This month’s round spans from the earliest days of cinema, through Hollywood’s golden age and Scorsese’s Raging Bull to Sharon Stone’s memoir.

Apr 9, 2021 — Uncovering “The Naked City,” Bruce Goldstein’s scintillating chronicle of The Naked City’s groundbreaking New York location shoot, is more than the best “where-they-filmed-it” doc ever made. As Goldstein wittily traces director Jules Dassin’s Gotham roots and influences, this twenty-three-minute documentary—now...

Mar 29, 2021 — Filmmakers, programmers, and critics remember a man who “embodied the spirit of cinema as robustly as anyone ever has.”

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Mar 19, 2021 — We’ve been watching and reading about films by Cecilia Mangini, Cheryl Dunye, Claire Denis, and Nina Menkes.

Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...

Mar 4, 2021 — Andreas Fontana’s Azor and Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider are competing in the Encounters program at the Berlinale.