Our Friend

Feb 26, 2019 — The trailblazing African American director Charles Burnett’s third feature, To Sleep with Anger (1990), was his biggest production to date, albeit still made on a modest budget of $1.4 million, a significant portion of which was raised through the attachment...

Feb 20, 2019 — An overview of the award winners and a few critical and personal favorites.

Feb 18, 2019 — The Swiss actor will be remembered for a range of characters spanning from heaven to hell.

Feb 8, 2019 — He became a star in Britain’s “angry young men” era, but some of his best work would come decades later.

Feb 5, 2019 — Shame (1968) is one of the great neglected films from Ingmar Bergman’s midcareer creative explosion. It builds on and surpasses the two Bergman films that immediately preceded it: the avant-garde milestone Persona (1966) and the surreal shocker Hour of the...

Jan 25, 2019 — Retrospectives in New York and Glasgow offer opportunities to catch up with or revisit the work of an outstanding director of comedies.

Jan 25, 2019 — Deep into Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, we sit in on a leisurely dinner-table chat that appears to be unrelated to the film’s main event, an illegal abortion conducted in a seedy hotel. After...

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Jan 4, 2019 — More than thirty years ago, a friend of Janus Films—the producer of I Was a Teenage Zombie—who knew of my interest in space exploration called me to say he had seen excerpts of a really cool film at DuArt, a lab...

Jan 3, 2019 — We look ahead to films by Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, Paul Verhoeven, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and dozens more.