The Hand

Aug 29, 2017 — We’re “in dire need of revolutionary narratives,” writes Dan Hassler-Forest. And he grants that a few Hollywood blockbusters have made a stab at it, specifically calling out The Hunger Games, Rogue One, and Mad Max: Fury Road. “But Hollywood’s most...

Aug 21, 2017 — When Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas fled Lithuania in 1944 only to land in a Nazi forced-labor camp, Jonas began to keep a diary. Entries from that diary are gathered in I Had Nowhere to Go, out now from...

Aug 18, 2017 — In this unsparing drama, Mike Leigh captures the grim mood of Thatcher’s England through the frustrations of a working-class London family.

Jul 31, 2017 — Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in...

Jul 17, 2017 — We begin this round in the UK because, starting Friday, Park Circus is putting Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) back in theaters, “marking 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 initiated a major development of the country's human rights legislation...

Jun 23, 2017 — Reporting on last year’s edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato for Film Comment, Dan Sullivan called the festival “a rare beast indeed: a one-week, primarily repertory film festival, mind-bogglingly dense with new restorations, legendary prints, discoveries and rediscoveries, canonical works presented...

Jun 15, 2017 — New York. “Among the most savage and surreal of Italian comedies, starring one of the country’s biggest stars”—Alberto Sordi—“and directed by one of its legendary filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom barely made a ripple when first released, in 1963,...

May 20, 2017 — “To fans of the mononymous Barbara—the delicate-voiced, emotionally acute French chanteuse adored by everyone from Jacques Brel to François Mitterand—Mathieu Amalric’s mega-meta, dreamily blurred biopic-within-a-film may seem a bemusing tribute to a national icon,” writes Guy Lodge at the top...

May 18, 2017 — Loveless is “two hours of gorgeously gloomy existential despair courtesy of the well-regarded Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “Often touted as an heir to Tarkovsky, Russian cinema’s other famously austere Andrey, Zvyagintsev previously...

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...