The King of Comedy

Feb 28, 2018 — A few days ago, we ran an essay here by Pico Iyer on Satyajit Ray’s The Hero (1966), followed by Meheli Sen’s comments on Uttam Kumar’s performance within the context of his stardom. Iyer has more to say and, writing...

Dec 9, 2017 — Ruben Östlund’s The Square has swept the thirtieth round of European Film Awards in Berlin during a ceremony in which EFA president Wim Wenders issued an urgent call for the revitalization of the European project as a corrective to rising...

Nov 4, 2017 — The European Film Academy and EFA Productions have announced the nominations for the thirtieth European Film Awards, and Ruben Östlund’s The Square, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, leads with six. The awards ceremony will take place...

Oct 17, 2017 — In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.

Sep 28, 2017 — “If you’ve never seen The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama about three Navy sailors on a debauched and ultimately tragic road trip, there are several reasons to rectify that,” begins Dana Stevens at Slate. “There’s a devilishly charismatic performance...

Sep 2, 2017 — Remembering Jerry Lewis in a piece for the Guardian, Martin Scorsese recalls working with him on King of Comedy: “Jerry Langford was an uncomfortable role for him to play, because he was skirting the edges of his own life in...

Jul 12, 2017 — La telenovela errante, a film Raúl Ruiz shot in 1990 (image above) and now fully realized by his widow and editor, Valeria Sarmiento, is one of the highlights of the lineup for this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The seventieth edition...

May 20, 2017 — “If he hadn’t already laid claim to the title of king of the cringe-inducing confrontation and nabob of the nervous laugh with the withering Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund truly anoints himself with The Square, an excoriating razor-burn of a movie...

May 2, 2017 — On a trip to the Library of Congress’s Mostly Lost workshop—affectionately known as “film-geek heaven”—Imogen Sara Smith joined early-cinema aficionados in uncovering treasures from the vaults.

Mar 21, 2017 — A “celluloid atrocity” overflowing with deviant shenanigans, John Waters’s low-budget satire makes mincemeat of the peace-and-love era.