The Best of Times

Dec 4, 2017 — One of the most anticipated highlights of lists and awards season is David Ehrlich’s spectacularly edited video countdown of his favorite films of the year. Today sees the 2017 edition that he’s been teasing on Twitter finally go live, and...

Nov 29, 2017 — The National Board of Review, established in 1909 and now boasting over 100 members, has named Steven Spielberg’s The Post as the best film of 2017. The Post won’t open until December 22 and reviews are embargoed until this coming...

Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...

Nov 6, 2017 — “One of the disorientations of where we’re at—the obliterative sucking splotch of a present tense in which we now all live—is that it feels simultaneously like a malign mischance and like something we should have seen coming a mile off,”...

Nov 3, 2017 — “The return of Twin Peaks in 2017 came like a Taser shock to the ‘golden age of television,’ overturning audience expectations for what Twin Peaks—and TV—could encompass, both in narrative and form,” writes Aliza Ma in the new issue of...

Oct 17, 2017 — One of the very best podcasts out there, You Must Remember This, is back with a new season, “Bela and Boris.” Karina Longworth introduces the first episode, “Where the Monsters Came From” (41’40”): “Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were two...

Oct 8, 2017 — The New York Film Festival presents BPM (Beats Per Minute) tonight and tomorrow, and we begin with Jordan Cronk, writing for Cinema Scope: “A sprawling yet affectingly personal portrait of a group of Parisian activists and ACT UP members in...

Oct 8, 2017 — “One of the most transporting depictions of the Downtown New York scene (in a field crowded with docs, memoirs and fictions—some by artists who weren’t alive at the time), Sara Driver’s Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel...

Oct 7, 2017 — “In just two adaptations,” begins Benedict Seal at Vague Visages, “author Brian Selznick has developed a reputation for inspiring intelligent and magical children’s films. After John Logan adapted The Invention of Hugo Cabaret for Martin Scorsese’s wonderful Hugo, Selznick has...

Sep 25, 2017 — Last year, I Am Not Madame Bovary premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Special Presentations award from the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) and would go on to win the top award at the...