The Blue Star

Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.

Jan 24, 2025 — We’re sampling new issues of Notebook, Senses of Cinema, and 032c and reading about Eisenstein and Charlotte Zwerin.

Sep 18, 2024 — We’re reading or anticipating new books from Pedro Almodóvar, Al Pacino, Werner Herzog, and Cher.

Jul 19, 2023 — This month we’re reading Pasolini, Chris Marker, Christian Petzold, Lorenza Mazzetti, Derek Jarman, and more.

May 28, 2021 — This week: Anarchy on screen, a pre-Code barroom brawl, an essay on Julie Dash, and conversations with Jia Zhangke and Sergei Loznitsa.

Apr 2, 2018 — This week sees the openings of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Locarno in Los Angeles, and DOC10 in Chicago, and I’ll have separate entries on all three events in a couple of days. New York. The BAMcinématek series Tough...

Mar 30, 2018 — New York. “Today’s manliest movie stars—mostly buffed-up superheroes like your Chrises Hemsworth, Pratt, and Evans—are scientifically enlarged and formed by state-of-the-art training and diet regimens,” writes Vern in the Village Voice. “Guys like Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and...

Feb 27, 2018 — Director Tony Richardson refracts the bawdy spirit of the 1960s through this brilliantly distilled take on an eighteenth-century picaresque.

Nov 14, 2011 — In 1989, the Communist rule that had dominated Eastern Europe since the end of the Second World War collapsed with astonishing rapidity. If the long-term political, economic, and ideological consequences of Europe’s reunification are still unfolding, there was an immediate...

Jun 10, 2011 — Bringing Junichiro Tanizaki’s sprawling, elegiac histor­ical novel The Makioka Sisters (1948) to the screen would seem an undertaking tailor-made for Kon Ichikawa. The renowned writer’s work was familiar territory for the veteran director, who had adapted the quirky Tanizaki novella...