As It Is In Life

Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique. A new life experience is in the air today, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders...

Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.

Jul 9, 2007 — The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker,...

Apr 24, 2006 — M ade in 1965 and still considered by many to be Marco Bellocchio’s masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket foreshadows the years of student protest in a family tragedy bordering on horror. This seminal first feature catapulted the twenty-six-year-old Bellocchio to...

Jul 22, 2026 — In his fiction features Beginners, 20th Century Women, and C’mon C’mon, the acclaimed director casts a sensitive gaze on the rich psychodynamics of human relationships and the hidden interconnections of our unconscious motivations.

Apr 9, 2026 — Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art introduce New Yorkers to some of the most exciting new voices in cinema.

Feb 6, 2026 — There’s an AI-driven reconstruction of The Magnificent Ambersons underway, a restoration of Michael Almereyda’s Nadia in theaters—and more.

Dec 22, 2025 — The critic and curator talks about working on a program of films by trailblazing Black women directors, which opened at London’s BFI Southbank this year and is now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Dec 16, 2025 — Paul Reubens’s iconic character comes to cinematic life in this collaboration with director Tim Burton, who creates an on-screen world that evokes the unbridled joy and overwhelming terror of childhood.

Oct 29, 2025 — In her intensely personal debut feature, the filmmaker and poet investigates the myths that have shaped South African history through a mix of archival footage, poetic remembrances, and conversations with friends and family.