This and That

Aug 12, 2017 — The International Jury of this year’s Locarno Festival, presided over by Olivier Assayas and including Jean-Stéphane Bron, Miguel Gomes, Christos Konstantakopoulos, and Birgit Minichmayr, has awarded the Golden Leopard to Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang—we’ve gathered reviews here. “I’ve been working...

Aug 8, 2017 — In Jan Speckenbach’s “intriguing, sincere, if somewhat overreaching sophomore feature,” Freedom, “Nora (Johanna Wokalek) wanders past Breugel’s Tower of Babel painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, while in Berlin, unaware of her whereabouts, her lawyer husband Philip (a sympathetic...

Aug 2, 2017 — “‘I will tell you immediately that 70 years is not an arriving point but a starting point,’ insists Locarno’s long-serving president Marco Solari of the festival’s platinum year.” So begins Geoffrey Macnab’s overview of this year’s edition, opening today and...

Jun 27, 2017 — Director Nadav Kurtz discusses what he learned while making his short film Paraíso, which chronicles the lives of three skyscraper-window washers in Chicago.

May 25, 2017 — “Leave it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, our favorite director of B movies that look like art films (or are they the other way around?), to upturn the nostalgia for American blockbusters of the 1980s,” begins Daniel Kasman in the Notebook. “Japan’s...

May 24, 2017 — Cannes kicked off the 1980s with a Palme d’Or win for a giant of Japanese cinema entering the final stages of his career. Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (the title of which literally translates as “shadow warrior”) follows a small-time thief who...

May 23, 2017 — “For ardent Hong Sangsoo fans, 2017 couldn’t be a more rewarding year,” writes Bradley Warren at the Playlist. “Not just because the South Korean filmmaker has three new films ready—the first, On the Beach at Night Alone, launched in Berlin—or...

Apr 21, 2017 — Twenty years after it first premiered on the IFC Channel, the pioneering program Split Screen stands as a priceless portrait of America’s wide-ranging, often quirky filmmaking community coming into its own. This irreverent show mixed footage of creator and host...

Apr 19, 2017 — Fresh off her successful collaboration with George Cukor on The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn secured her comeback after a brief career slump with George Stevens’s 1942 Woman of the Year. This clever battle-of-the-sexes comedy—which marked the actor’s first on-screen partnership...

Jan 23, 2017 — One of the most striking elements of Something Wild, Jack Garfein’s psychologically complex examination of trauma and attachment, is the 1960s New York City its distressed characters inhabit. Shot by Eugen Schüfftan, an Oscar-winning German cinematographer renowned for the special-effects...