What We Started

Jan 21, 2020 — One of the lesser-known films in Godard’s extraordinary run of 1960s masterpieces, this severe, angular thriller was the director’s first foray into the political territory that would prove so essential to his later work.

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Dec 10, 2019 — Rock music, as director Wim Wenders once joked in an interview, offered to him and other Germans of his generation the “only alternative to Beethoven.” There is likely as much truth as hyper­­bole in the statement; considering the role that...

Nov 26, 2019 — In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte...

Nov 20, 2019 — A new collection of essays connects the dots between Farber’s paintings and film criticism.

Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...

Nov 12, 2019 — Thai filmmaker Sorayos Prapapan’s Death of the Sound Man begins with a black screen accompanied by the mysterious but unmistakably sexual sound of someone slurping. Shortly after, the first shot reveals a young man in a sound booth fellating a...

Oct 15, 2019 — Born in Denmark to a wealthy family in 1879, Benjamin Christensen dropped out of medical school to receive training as an opera singer, only to lose his singing voice to what was diagnosed as an incurable nervous illness. He then...

Oct 15, 2019 — After breaking through in Medium Cool, Forster floundered until Quentin Tarantino plucked him from undeserved obscurity nearly thirty years later.

Oct 7, 2019 — Critics respond to the New York Film Festival’s selection of new moving image art.