Odd Obsession

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Oct 11, 2022 — Frank Capra’s flamboyant farce—his only black comedy—finds an uncharacteristically frenetic Cary Grant surrounded by a clan of genteel maniacs.

Jan 10, 2022 — The writer and director was on top of the world before the going got tough.

Jan 5, 2021 — The film begins at night. Under the credits, there are views from a car in motion, before four people arrive at a stately home in the woods. There is a married couple, François (Paul Frankeur) and Simone (Delphine Seyrig) Thévenot....

May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...

Apr 9, 2018 — The retrospective of work by Lucrecia Martel at the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be the first of many around the country and abroad in the coming weeks, so we’ll take a closer look in a separate entry on...

Oct 5, 2017 — This is the documentary that put an end to Steven Spielberg’s plans to produce a narrative feature—to be directed by Sam Mendes—based on Gay Talese’s book, The Voyeur’s Motel. Spielberg had bought the rights after the New Yorker ran an...

Sep 30, 2017 — Before We Vanish, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, screens tonight (Saturday) and tomorrow (October 1) as part of the Main Slate of this year’s New York Film Festival.“This giddily enjoyable stew of absurdist gore from...

Aug 31, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, premiering in Competition in Venice and screening as a Special Presentation in Toronto, is a “ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore, [offering] more straight-up movie for...

Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.