Up to a Certain Point

Mar 26, 2021 — Today’s round features writing on Catherine Breillat, William Greaves, Thom Andersen, and Patricia Highsmith.

Dec 17, 2020 — The year 1999 was several months old when I entered Los Guajolotes, a restaurant that, like so many others in Mexico City, has now disappeared. I was walking to my table when a person who appeared to live on the streets...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Nov 9, 2020 — Critics find the story behind the writing of Citizen Kane steeped in all the glory and sleaze of Old Hollywood.

Oct 5, 2020 — Three of the five stand-alone features in this anthology series have premiered in New York, and the reviews have been rock solid.

Sep 16, 2019 — Martin Eden tops the Platform competition, while audiences go for Jojo Rabbit.

Sep 11, 2019 — Following his landmark collection of photographs, The Americans, Frank made essential films about the Beats, the Stones, and his own personal tragedies.

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

May 31, 2019 — Cannes 2019 Cannes has been top dog in the festival world as long as anyone can remember. It was originally set to launch in 1939 as a conscious political reply by liberal democracy to the success of Mussolini in establishing...

May 21, 2019 — Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) is one of the great films about middle-aged loneliness, specifically—though not exclusively—as women feel it. It’s not a dating movie, though there’s dating in it. And it’s not a feeling-sorry-for-oneself movie, though there are...