The Assistant

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Nov 17, 2020 — Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner is having quite the year, with the rapturous reception of his work on Steve McQueen’s Small Axe films, which played at New York Film Festival and will launch on Amazon this Friday. Prior to this breakthrough, he’s...

Sep 15, 2020 — When Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) first appeared on American screens, the critic Stephen Holden used a striking phrase to capture its embracing of bold opposites: “voluptuous austerity.” His characterization, widely quoted since, illuminates the film on many levels, and...

May 27, 2020 — London-based director Sandhya Suri already had several acclaimed documentaries to her name—including I Is for India (2005) and Around India with a Movie Camera (2018)—when she decided to make her first foray into narrative filmmaking. Inspired by some of the...

Jul 9, 2019 — Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film Europa Europa recounts the incredible but true story of how Salomon Perel, born in 1925 in Germany to a Polish Jewish family, survived the Holocaust by posing as a pure Aryan German raised in Poland. Recruited...

Jan 25, 2019 — Deep into Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, we sit in on a leisurely dinner-table chat that appears to be unrelated to the film’s main event, an illegal abortion conducted in a seedy hotel. After...

Jul 20, 2016 — In his staggeringly ambitious masterwork A Touch of Zen, Chinese filmmaker King Hu imbues dynamic scenes of combat with balletic grace and audacious stylistic experimentation.

Jun 29, 2016 — Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria brings together Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart to play out a psychologically complex relationship between two women. Binoche, once again teaming up with Assayas, after starring in his 2008 drama Summer Hours, is Maria...

Jan 5, 2016 — Toshiya Fujita’s two-film saga set exuberant, manga-inspired martial-arts choreography against a backdrop of a Japanese society in transition to unfold a vivid tale of epic vengeance.

May 22, 2015 — It is one of my most strongly held critical beliefs that you should not write about films you don’t like. First, it is bad for the soul to exult in pointing out the deficiencies of the film in question. Second,...