The Best in Hell

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Jan 10, 2020 — How do movies work? It’s a question that seems to have been on more than a few minds this week.

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.

Apr 19, 2018 — Following yesterday’s news that David Cronenberg will be heading up the International Jury at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival in July, the Venice International Film Festival has announced that Cronenberg will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for...

Oct 23, 2017 — “Meet the new hotshots of American filmmaking,” offers the Observer, stacking four profiles on one page. Tim Lewis gets Dee Rees talking about Mudbound (“The mud wasn’t free!”) and going with Netflix: “I think Netflix are disrupters and maybe they...

May 25, 2017 — “It’s baffling that Jacques Doillon’s Rodin was granted one of the main-competition slots,” writes Manohla Dargis in her latest dispatch from the Cannes Film Festival back to the New York Times. “A handsomely mounted waxworks, it might have made sense...

Jan 30, 2014 — Growing up with the epically zany, star-studded comedy.

Sep 27, 2011 — Internationally, Victor Sjöström is best known for his performance as Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). But behind that unforgettable face of old age is a younger man, a leading actor who was also the greatest Swedish...

Feb 2, 2011 — This essay first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the author. Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was...

Nov 13, 1991 — Richard Lester’s Help! was the first of a new kind of rock-and-roll movie which altered the shape, face, and form of rock music. Before Help!, most of the rock-and-roll genre movies were simple, self contained films conceived in the narrowest...