The Old Guard

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...

May 27, 2017 — “When French writer Delphine le Vigan published her book Based on a True Story in 2015, some critics dubbed it ‘a Hitchcockian novel,’” begins Jonathan Romney, writing for Screen. “It’s not surprising, then, that Roman Polanski’s adaptation is very Hitchcockian...

May 27, 2017 — “Some filmmakers rust during periods of inactivity,” begins Guy Lodge in Variety. “Lynne Ramsay arches and tenses, lying in wait like an attack dog. And attack she does, though not in all the expected ways, in her astonishing fourth feature...

May 26, 2017 — “After a foray into relatively restrained period filmmaking in the recent, World War I-set Frantz, François Ozon is back to his old tricks—and really, who's complaining?” asks Jon Frosch in the Hollywood Reporter. “Premiering in competition at Cannes, the French...

May 25, 2017 — “The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has ever a heist gone quite so wrong to quite such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Bouncing wildly...

May 25, 2017 — “The act of seeing has a special meaning in Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s Radiance, in which the job of character Misako (Ayame Misaki) is to write the scripts for the audio-assist provided for blind patrons at the movies,” writes Barbara...

May 23, 2017 — “He was the epitome of the suave English gent, quipping sweatlessly in a bespoke three-piece suit, who enjoyed an acting career spanning eight decades,” writes Benjamin Lee for the Guardian. “On Tuesday, Roger Moore’s children announced his death at the...

May 23, 2017 — “If you told me you could make a modern Christmas classic largely set outside a doughnut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, centered on transgender prostitutes and shot on iPhones, I wouldn’t have believed you,” begins Ben Kenigsberg at RogerEbert.com. “But...

May 22, 2017 — Abel Ferrara’s “visits to Cannes almost invariably turn into special occasions, whether he's hosting an off-fest screening of an incendiary Dominique Strauss-Kahn film à clef or, in 2008, offering his opinion of the Bad Lieutenant remake,” writes Ben Kenigsberg at...

May 22, 2017 — Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer “makes the absurd, amazing The Lobster seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison,” declares Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “A film of clean hands, cold heart, and near-Satanic horror, it...