Hymn to Her

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...

Feb 24, 2015 — Federico Fellini’s fragmentary and picturesque tale of death and debauchery in ancient Rome is a surreal take on reality.

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...

Jan 7, 1991 — Vittorio de Sica remembers the inspirations behind and the making of his classic film.

Jun 28, 2019 — This week’s highlights include an oral history of one of Kubrick’s most challenging sequences and reviews of the latest works from Béla Tarr and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Jun 20, 2017 — With both films now streaming on the Criterion Channel, director Carroll Ballard discusses the parallels between his short documentary Rodeo and Francesco Rosi’s bull-fighting classic The Moment of Truth.

Sep 15, 2017 — “Harry Dean Stanton, the character actor with the world-weary face who carved out an exceptional career playing grizzled loners and colorful, offbeat characters in such films as Paris, Texas and Repo Man, has died.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes and...

Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.