Time in the Sun

Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda In September 2018, I screened Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places for the Michigan State University Film Collective. We had a lively discussion that went past the scheduled ending time. As I was getting...

Jun 12, 2019 — One Scene One of the most talked-about movies at this year’s Sundance, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is both a rhapsodic portrait of first-time director Joe Talbot’s native city and a mournful look at how gentrification, income inequality,...

May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...

Apr 21, 2018 — We’re going to be doing a little renovating around here, so this will be the last Daily post for about a week or so. It’ll be worth the wait. You’ll see. In the meantime, let’s have a quick look at...

Apr 4, 2018 — “It has been half a century since Werner Herzog released his first full-length feature, Signs of Life (1968) which depicts a wounded German WWII paratrooper losing his mind on a torpid Greek island,” writes Joseph Hincks, introducing his interview for...

Jun 20, 2017 — “Bertrand Tavernier joins a growing list of filmmakers who've made what amounts to an epic video essay with My Journey Through French Cinema, a three-hour-plus leap into notable French filmmaking from roughly 1930 to 1980,” writes Clayton Dillard at Slant....

May 18, 2017 — “Like a Judd Apatow thriller or a Michael Haneke kids flick, the concept of a Claire Denis comedy at first sounds like a contradiction in terms,” begins Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “After all, the 71-year-old French auteur, whose...

Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.

Sep 24, 2015 — Bruce Beresford critiques the British colonialist era in this precise, layered adaptation of a 1939 novel by Joyce Cary.

Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.