The Rebel

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...

May 16, 2019 — All week long, writers have been reminding us that there was more to Doris Day than sweet sunshine.

Mar 18, 2019 — One Scene When Jia Zhangke made his 1997 feature debut, Xiao Wu, he was rebelling against decades of tradition that had drawn a hard line between cinema and reality. Chinese film history is rooted in genres found in classical theater...

Jun 11, 2018 — Building on a rich lineage of gothic fairy tales and noirish melodramas, this lavishly stylized curio has an ominous beauty all its own.

Jan 26, 2018 — New York. Tomorrow, to celebrate the republication of Stan Brakhage’s book Metaphors on Vision (1963), the Metrograph and Light Industry cofounders Ed Halter and Thomas Beard will present a 16 mm print of his 1957 short Daybreak & Whiteye—and a...

Jan 23, 2018 — Made during the German occupation of France, these beguiling films showcase Claude Autant-Lara at the height of his powers.

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...

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...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...