The Text of Light

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Oct 17, 2017 — In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.

Oct 6, 2017 — Kevin Jerome Everson has a nine-minute short screening as part of Projections’ Program 1: Speculative Spaces at the New York Film Festival. In IFO, “which stands for ‘Identified Flying Object,’ African Americans look up at the skies and report alien...

Sep 26, 2017 — Let’s start today’s round with a few books. Next month sees the release of Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Dave Kehr’s followup to his 2011 book, When Movies Mattered. Before he became a curator in the...

Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.

Sep 23, 2002 — The theatricality of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller makes the point that psychoanalysis is a sister to cinema rather than a rival.

May 17, 2024 — We’re reading about Chris Marker and Hiroshi Shimizu and listening to conversations from Cannes.

Mar 18, 2024 — It’s an eclectic bunch this month, featuring a new play, a ban on the color green, and Godzilla.

Aug 6, 2021 — Catching up with the latest from Alphaville, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, La Furia Umana, and Film-Philosophy.

Jan 3, 2020 — The director of Margaret and Manchester by the Sea celebrates Hollywood’s greatest humanist, whose films are featured in a series now playing on the Criterion Channel.