The Big Shot

Dec 4, 2019 — Songbook Midway through Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), the plot pivots on a song. “You’ve got some weird shit in here,” says Joanne (Kierston Wareing,), riffling through the CDs in her new boyfriend’s car. It’s the morning after a boozy...

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...

Jul 16, 2019 — Armando Iannucci will open London, and Locarno and Venice are preparing their 2019 lineups

Jun 10, 2019 — The growing presence of unabashed queerness in contemporary culture makes the past seem comparatively drained of it. But it was always there. There’s often a queer history that lies beneath our accepted mainstream hetero narratives. When excavated, these histories can...

Mar 6, 2019 — Performances As Howard Hawks was preparing to make His Girl Friday, his 1940 version of the classic Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, he was determined not to repeat what he felt had been a problem with his earlier comedy Bringing Up...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Aug 20, 2018 — A haven for punks and drifters, 1980s downtown New York is captured in all its grit and romance in Susan Seidelman’s Palme d’Or–nominated debut feature.

Apr 9, 2018 — Ingrid Bergman’s work in her native Sweden was an early showcase for her dazzlingly precocious talent and emotional depth.

Apr 2, 2018 — This week sees the openings of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Locarno in Los Angeles, and DOC10 in Chicago, and I’ll have separate entries on all three events in a couple of days. New York. The BAMcinématek series Tough...

Mar 23, 2018 — New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has rolled out the lineup for the fifth edition of Art of the Real, “an essential showcase for the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking.” The series will...