First Position

Nov 27, 2017 — On May 1, 2001, Dieter Kosslick took over as director of the Berlin International Film Festival, following Moritz de Hadeln, who’d held the job for twenty years. On May 31, 2019, the day after his seventy-first birthday, Kosslick’s current contract...

Oct 28, 2017 — We begin with a few translations. Asymptote lives up to its own billing as “the premier site for world literature in translation” with the presentation of Adam Kuplowsky’s renderings in English of some observational work by Yasujiro Ozu. “These three...

Oct 19, 2017 — Even as we mourn the loss of Danielle Darrieux, we need to remember a few more names and faces that have left their marks on cinema, and we begin with French actor Jean Rochefort. “I am absolutely stunned,” writes Terry...

Oct 12, 2017 — The Chicago International Film Festival opens tonight with Reginald Hudlin’s Marshall and runs through October 26, when it closes with Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which won the Golden Lion in Venice (reviews).“Some biopics go for sweeping and...

Oct 10, 2017 — Two singing mermaid sisters take 1980s Poland by storm in this extravagantly mounted musical-horror hybrid.

Sep 24, 2017 — For the final issue in print of the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri talks with Jonas Mekas, “the 94-year-old filmmaker, artist, critic, poet, photographer, cinema owner, and all-around underground impresario who transformed film criticism, filmmaking, and exhibition throughout the 1960s and...

Sep 11, 2017 — In this documentary portrait of the Newport Folk Festival, Murray Lerner captured seismic changes in American music and politics.

Sep 6, 2017 — When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at Sundance, I gathered a first round of reviews, beginning with Justin Chang’s for the Los Angeles Times: “Adapted from Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound sketches a vivid, dirt-under-the-nails panorama of 1940s Mississippi farm country, centered...

Sep 2, 2017 — “The names Joel and Ethan Coen pop up on a lot of screenplays these days (Bridge of Spies, Unbroken), now that they’re getting credit for the kind of script-polishing they used to do anonymously,” begins Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “But Suburbicon...

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.