Past Lives

Feb 1, 2019 — Rotterdam and Vanity Fair get a cinephile’s dream roster of filmmakers talking about their work.

Jan 30, 2019 — An exhibition, a film series, and of course, If Beale Street Could Talk are markers of heightened interest in the writer, activist, and cinephile.

Jan 16, 2019 — Unquiet is the first of Linn Ullmann’s books to directly address her parents. Plus, the criticism of Rivette and Bazin, a radio campaign led by Welles, and more.

Jan 14, 2019 — Songbook “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” could have had many lives before the life it eventually had. But the song had to work hard to be recorded at all. No one particularly wanted to sing it, and it was turned...

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Dec 13, 2018 — The Berlinale will premiere new work by Angela Schanelec and Denis Côté, Rotterdam’s got an opener, and Steven Soderbergh will preview his latest at Slamdance.

Dec 11, 2018 — As critics list their favorite television shows of 2018, we take a look at some of the most notable writing about a few of their picks.

Dec 11, 2018 — Note: The terms black and white were part of the way racial categories were referred to in South Africa under apartheid. Other terms, like nonwhite and non-European, were also used to mark racial segregation. In the following essay, the term...

Dec 7, 2018 — Christian Petzold’s films are like dances in which people circle each other but never quite connect. The most resonant moments in the German writer-director’s work are not ones of dialogue or plot development but of blocking and choreography: bodies intertwining,...