The Movie of My Life

Aug 7, 2017 — The big news to catch up with here is the launch of Film Critic: Adrian Martin, “almost 20 years, on and off, in the making.” Adrian Martin has been writing essential film criticism for four decades now, and what’s collected...

Jul 31, 2017 — Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in...

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...

Jul 18, 2017 — During a period of personal turmoil, Andrei Tarkovsky created this enigmatic masterpiece, which explores spiritual and metaphysical mysteries through the prism of a science-fiction epic.

Jun 30, 2017 — Jonathan Rosenbaum’s posted a revised version of his 1999 essay on the “Origins and Legacy of the Conspiracy Thriller”: “It’s a tradition that harks back to Louis Feuillade’s silent serial of 1915-1916, Les vampires, about a gang of ingenious working-class...

Jun 16, 2017 — The title of the first part of Tom Paulus’s projected three-part essay for photogénie, “The Love Connection: Another Jam Session on Narrative,” references “Jam Session on Non-Narrative,” a conversation that took place between film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Ehrenstein, and...

Jun 10, 2017 — On Wednesday, Martin Scorsese, in partnership with the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO, officially launched the African Film Heritage Project. The Film Foundation, founded and chaired by Scorsese, will take part in the restoration of fifty African films....

Jun 1, 2017 — “The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer,” writes Martin Scorsese in the new issue of the TLS. “They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but,...

May 21, 2017 — “Arguably, more question marks hung over the prospect of Redoubtable than over any other film in Cannes this year,” begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. “One reason was the idea of Michel Hazanavicius, director of the world-beating The Artist, seeming too...

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...