The Test

May 27, 2025 — The triumphant return of Jafar Panahi capped off what many consider to be a terrific year at Cannes.

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.

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.

May 7, 2019 — Humming light sabers weren’t the only thing going on during the maligned decade.

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...

Dec 12, 2017 — “Evil is ascendant,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “The Resistance—an intrepid, multi-everything group whose leaders include a battle-tested woman warrior—has been fighting the good fight for years but is outnumbered and occasionally outmaneuvered. Yes, the latest Star...

Jul 10, 2016 — The author, a filmmaker and film professor who cowrote a book on Abbas Kiarostami, remembers the late Iranian director.

May 17, 2016 — Juxtaposing a vision of a stark, primitive existence on a remote Japanese island with that country’s vast twentieth-century modernization, Kaneto Shindo reveals Japan’s postwar paradoxes and makes a case for its essential, immutable character.

Jan 21, 2016 — In Gilda, Charles Vidor’s “violent, sexual, chaotic” noir, the director focused on Rita Hayworth’s skills as an actor and a dancer, eliciting a performance that became iconic in its own right and made her an international superstar.