The Test

May 22, 2015 — It is one of my most strongly held critical beliefs that you should not write about films you don’t like. First, it is bad for the soul to exult in pointing out the deficiencies of the film in question. Second,...

Nov 7, 2012 — In this clip from the recent documentary A Testimony as an Image, which reunites members of the Rashomon crew nearly sixty years after Akira Kurosawa’s epochal film was made, lighting and electrical technician Genkon Nakaoka describes the four hours of...

May 29, 2026 — We’re revisiting work by Tarkovsky, Pelechian, and Portabella as well as two films with the word Dead in the title.

Sep 16, 2025 — In response to the suffocating conservatism of the eighties, Lizzie Borden crafted a pluralistic vision of a feminist front that neither ignores difference nor lets it stand as an immovable obstacle to political solidarity.

Aug 27, 2025 — The summer’s been terrific for new movie magazines and filmmaker biographies.

Apr 25, 2025 — A busy week brings writing on the LA Rebellion, Jean-Luc Godard, and Elaine May, and a conversation with Pedro Almodóvar.

Nov 22, 2023 — Quite an emotional range this week, from musicals and romantic comedies to the terror of nuclear war.

Mar 28, 2022 — At once euphoric and elegiac, Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary captures the members of the Band on the brink of spiritual and physical collapse as they mount their transcendent final send-off.

Jul 6, 2021 — As the festival adds one last title to its lineup, attendees, vaccinated or tested, are once again streaming up and down the Croisette.

Mar 20, 2018 — “More than forty-two years after principal photography wrapped on Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, a ‘locked picture’ is finally in place,” reports Ray Kelly at Wellesnet. “It is being color-corrected with sound work continuing as the movie...