The Notebook

Jun 19, 2012 — Steven Soderbergh delivers a poignant psychological portrait of the late Spalding Gray in this deftly structured documentary.

Feb 12, 2018 — Before looking ahead to some of this week’s highlights city by city, we have some festival news to see to. The Venice International Film Festival has announced that Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) will preside over the International...

Feb 1, 2018 — The first half of the series Martin Scorsese Presents Republic Rediscovered: New Restorations from Paramount Pictures, organized by Dave Kehr, a curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film in association with Scorsese’s Film Foundation and Paramount Pictures,...

Aug 5, 2017 — “Two gloriously muscled bodybuilders eye each other with distrust, envy and contempt at the gym in Denis Côte’s A Soft the Skin.” That’s one of the moments from the first days of this year’s Locarno Festival that has stuck with...

May 18, 2017 — Loveless is “two hours of gorgeously gloomy existential despair courtesy of the well-regarded Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “Often touted as an heir to Tarkovsky, Russian cinema’s other famously austere Andrey, Zvyagintsev previously...

Aug 28, 2015 — Wim Wenders’s movie career has been a heck of a journey. The director, who turned seventy this month, was one of the prime movers behind New German Cinema in the seventies and, in the decades since, has gone on to...

Jul 17, 2012 — Down by Law, released in 1986, was Jim Jarmusch’s third movie. Unlike its predecessors, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), it did not take off from a semi-documentary view of downtown Manhattan. It was shot entirely on location...

Robert Rubsam writes fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Baffler, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, Poetry, Vulture, and MUBI Notebook.

Aug 7, 2025 — A highlight among the many goings on in New York over the next several weeks is a tribute to Luc Moullet.

Apr 25, 2025 — A busy week brings writing on the LA Rebellion, Jean-Luc Godard, and Elaine May, and a conversation with Pedro Almodóvar.