Song I

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

May 27, 2020 — “A filmmaker shows what his career will be in his first 150 feet of film,” François Truffaut once wrote. He was talking about Jean Vigo at the time, but he might as well have been talking about Martin Scorsese, whose...

Dec 4, 2019 — Songbook Midway through Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), the plot pivots on a song. “You’ve got some weird shit in here,” says Joanne (Kierston Wareing,), riffling through the CDs in her new boyfriend’s car. It’s the morning after a boozy...

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Apr 10, 2017 — In this 1964 television interview, Jacques Demy defends his use of wall-to-wall singing and Michel Legrand takes to the piano for a few bars from one of his most famous compositions.

Apr 9, 2012 — Among the lasting artistic contributions to American culture of the great Paul Robeson (born on this date in 1898) was his beautiful, booming singing voice. In addition to being an actor, activist, and orator, Robeson was a star of the concert hall....

Sep 16, 2025 — King Princess—the project of Brooklyn-based vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and actor Mikaela Straus—released her triumphant third record, Girl Violence, this month. Straus has also recently made her television debut in the new season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, and later...

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...

Sep 26, 2023 — Brett Morgen’s portrait of David Bowie is a free-associative hybrid of pop history and imaginative extravaganza—impressionistic, eclectically allusive, and, above all, immersive.

Aug 21, 2018 — A mythic piece of early Finnish cinema gets reimagined in the short film The Moonshiners, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.