The New Spirit

Feb 6, 2018 — “A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for...

Jan 31, 2018 — The SXSW Film Festival, whose 2018 edition runs from March 9 through 18, has announced a lineup of 132 features—with more on the way. With descriptions from the festival . . . Narrative Feature CompetitionFamily. Director/Screenwriter: Laura Steinel. When an...

Jan 24, 2018 — The forty-seventh edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam opens today and runs through February 4. Over a month ago now, we started tracking the lineup, which the IFFR unveiled bit by bit every few days, culminating with the publication...

Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...

Jan 3, 2018 — Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, and exhibitions and film series celebrating the hundredth anniversary are already underway. Update, 1/5: Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, a Janus Films retrospective of twenty-four works, will open at New York’s Film Forum on...

Dec 29, 2017 — From C. Mason Wells comes word that Dan Talbot, founder of New Yorker Films (and pictured above in front of the New Yorker Theater with Alfred Hitchcock), has passed away. “Alongside his wife Toby, few did more for world cinema...

Dec 27, 2017 — Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost some writers who’ve made unique contributions to film criticism. At Film Studies for Free, Catherine Grant has posted an entry in memory of “radical film and media scholar” Chuck Kleinhans. “Along with...

Dec 19, 2017 — With the addition of eight features, a virtual reality experience, and hosted retrospectives, the lineup for the 2018 Sundance Film Festival (January 18 through 28) is now complete. Previously announced are the features programs, the lineups for the new Indie...

Dec 15, 2017 — First up, as Kristopher Tapley reports for Variety, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has narrowed the list of contenders for the best foreign language film Oscar to nine: A Fantastic Woman, directed by Sebastián Lelio, ChileIn the...

Dec 6, 2017 — “There’s topical, there’s timely, and then there’s The Post, which feels less like a historical thriller set in 1971 than it does an exhilarating caricature of the year 2017,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “While Steven Spielberg’s latest film rivetingly...