Love You to Death

Aug 5, 2019 — At the San Francisco Silent Film Festival you can expect to see many great, even perfect, treasures of cinema, popular classics, and critical favorites. At the age of twenty-four, the event has become increasingly central to the silent cinema calendar—one...

Mar 29, 2019 — Fresh assessments of the work of Chris Marker and Stanley Kubrick, an interview with Kent Jones, and that stellar year for American cinema, 1999.

Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

Apr 10, 2017 — Critic Peter Cowie pays tribute to a quintessentially English master, whose prolific career stretches back to the silent era.

Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

Jun 12, 2012 — Hal Ashby’s delicately off-kilter May-December romance stars two of the unlikeliest countercultural icons of the seventies.

Jul 9, 2007 — Set almost entirely in a single house, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s eloquent collaboration with writer Kobo Abe shows both his powerful staging and his love of fine, almost microscopic, detail.

Aug 18, 2003 — One of the Swedish director’s most representative works, this drama’s portentousness, banked intensity, and recondite symbolism come near to embodying the popular stereotype of the Bergmanesque.

May 27, 2026 — Is it possible to look without trying to grasp the object of one’s gaze? Traditional ethnographic documentaries, much like the written ethnographies that preceded them, have attempted to explain a given culture to those who don’t belong to it, assuming...