The Music Room

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...

Mar 28, 2018 — “Forty-seven years young,” writes the staff at Slant, “New Directors/New Films—programmed by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art—is an eclectic, geographically far-flung survey of bourgeoning filmmaking talent, and more than ever, this year’s lineup...

Dec 10, 2017 — The thirty-third IDA Documentary Awards were presented by the International Documentary Association in a ceremony hosted by comedian Maz Jobrani on Saturday night in Los Angeles. Here are all the nominees with the winners in bold. Best Feature Matthew Heineman’s...

Jul 1, 2014 — The author’s recollections of the great English actor.

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

Sep 30, 2009 — Agnès Varda’s 1962 New Wave masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 has gotten a dramatic reinterpretation from Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, stage directors and founders of New York’s Big Dance Theater. Comme Toujours Here I Stand—which premiered in April...

Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...

Jun 10, 2026 — Early reviews of his thirty-fifth feature may be all over the place, but appreciation of the man himself is universal.

Jul 31, 2025 — Series celebrating a giant of American cinema are on in Boston, Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.

May 25, 2017 — “Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary,” begins Jay Weissberg in Variety. “His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy,...