Better Times

Sep 24, 2017 — For the final issue in print of the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri talks with Jonas Mekas, “the 94-year-old filmmaker, artist, critic, poet, photographer, cinema owner, and all-around underground impresario who transformed film criticism, filmmaking, and exhibition throughout the 1960s and...

Sep 21, 2017 — The editors of Senses of Cinema open Issue 84 with a “near exhaustive dossier” on Christian Petzold and a second entitled “Sartre at the Movies.” Here, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of French cinema, Dudley Andrew, explores the ideas...

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...

Sep 17, 2017 — Michael Pearce’s debut feature, Beast, is a “multi-layered, complex account of a fatal attraction between two complicated and fragile souls, Moll (Jessie Buckley) and Pascal (Johnny Flynn),” writes Kaleem Aftab for Cineuropa. “The action takes place on Jersey, where the...

Sep 17, 2017 — “Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It,” declares Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s...

Sep 15, 2017 — “Harry Dean Stanton, the character actor with the world-weary face who carved out an exceptional career playing grizzled loners and colorful, offbeat characters in such films as Paris, Texas and Repo Man, has died.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes and...

Sep 15, 2017 — Our first order of business here is to catch up with an item or two you’ve most likely already heard enough about. But there’s no getting around at least a mention of the replacement of Colin Trevorrow as director of...

Sep 11, 2017 — In this documentary portrait of the Newport Folk Festival, Murray Lerner captured seismic changes in American music and politics.

Sep 11, 2017 — “Brace yourselves,” warns Leonardo Goi, writing for Cinema Scope: “after the American sojourn that brought the likes of Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2 and a detour into Chinese historical-blockbuster mode with Red Cliff, John Woo has returned to the Asian...

Sep 7, 2017 — “A central tenet of feminist film theory holds that the havoc wreaked on the bodies of women propels narrative storytelling,” writes Holly Willis in the new issue of Film Comment. “The new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Unknown...