Presence

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...

Sep 1, 2017 — “There are any number of unforgettable images in Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, the most necessary and comprehensive documentary to date about our planet’s current refugee crisis,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “but the most indelible of them all is borrowed from...

Aug 30, 2017 — Paul Schrader’s First Reformed premieres in Competition in Venice before screening in the Masters program in Toronto, and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody finds it to be “a fierce film; Schrader, one of the crucial creators of the modern cinema...

Aug 27, 2017 — Tobe Hooper, whose 1974 shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “became one of the most influential horror films of all time,” as Pat Saperstein puts it in Variety, has passed away at the age of seventy-four. Saperstein: “Shot for less...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...

Aug 22, 2017 — French cinema titan Sacha Guitry brings a savage misanthropy to this exploration of a toxic marriage and the arbitrariness of the legal system.

Aug 20, 2017 — “Jerry Lewis, the brash slapstick comic who teamed with Dean Martin in the 1950s and later starred in The Nutty Professor and The Bellboy before launching the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, has died,” report Richard Natale and Carmel Dagan for Variety....

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.

Aug 17, 2017 — “My first job out of UCLA Film School, at age twenty-two, was directing second unit on The Night of the Hunter for Charles Laughton.” So begins a collection of memories, pre-production sketches, and screenplay pages at the Talkhouse Film from...

Aug 15, 2017 — “Given that this edition of Locarno was its 70th, it was a shame that no special anniversary prize was created and bestowed on Raúl Ruíz's gloriously strange The Wandering Soap Opera,” finds James Lattimer at the House Next Door. “The...