The State of Things

Dec 14, 2021 — In 1968, soon after he graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Mani Kaul made an arresting short titled Forms and Designs. It observes artisans at work across the country, some swimming alone against the tide of mass...

Nov 23, 2021 — Written and directed by the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, as a vehicle for two icons, funnyman Adam Sandler and basketball great Kevin Garnett, Uncut Gems (2019) is breathtakingly profane, alarming, and comic. Most simply described, the movie is one...

Sep 3, 2021 — In the thirty-fifth edition of the Italian festival dedicated to restored films, an eclectic lineup underscores the transportive physicality of cinema after a long year stuck at home.

Aug 31, 2020 — “Movies show us ourselves as we had not yet learned to recognize us—something in the nature of daily being or happening that quickly gets folded over into ancient history like yesterday’s newspaper, but in so doing a new face has...

Aug 27, 2020 — Writer, director, editor, and coproducer Sandoval stars as an undocumented Filipina drawn into a relationship with an unstable man.

Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...

Sep 4, 2019 — With their novelistic density and sexual openness, the films of French master André Téchiné introduced director Stephen Cone to a strange new world of contradictions.

Aug 6, 2019 — Once, in 1977, Werner Herzog read a news item about a volcano that was supposed to erupt in Guadeloupe and one man living there who refused to evacuate with the rest of the island’s population. Herzog being Herzog, he immediately...

Apr 17, 2018 — The seventeenth Tribeca Film Festival opens tonight in New York with Love, Gilda, Lisa D’Apolito’s portrait of beloved comic actress Gilda Radner, and screens around one hundred more features before wrapping on April 29. Throughout the festival’s run, I’ll be...

Mar 24, 2018 — Just a day or two after Stephen Hawking left us on March 14, Isaac Butler called up Errol Morris for Slate to talk about A Brief History of Time (1991), the documentary that takes it title from Hawking’s surprise bestseller....