The Swan

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Sep 15, 2017 — “Harry Dean Stanton, the character actor with the world-weary face who carved out an exceptional career playing grizzled loners and colorful, offbeat characters in such films as Paris, Texas and Repo Man, has died.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes and...

Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.

Oct 2, 2018 — Performances There’s an irreducible reserve about Kristen Stewart, an appearance of not doing much on-screen, that I mistook for lack of talent when I first saw her mumbling into her shirt in the Twilight franchise. Still, playing Bella Swan, chastity...

Jul 19, 2017 — “Yvonne Rainer stands as one of the most influential choreographers of the past fifty-plus years,” begins Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice. “In 1962 she co-founded the Judson Dance Theater, that exalted wellspring of experimental movement; a decade later, she...

Nov 18, 2018 — This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

Aug 19, 2025 — In his fifth and sixth feature films, Edward Yang sought to uncover what was hidden in Taipei society, often in plain sight, looking past the city’s shiny skyline to the fault lines beneath the surface.

Jan 21, 2018 — “After innumerable plays, books, films, made-for-TV series and specials, and even an opera and a musical, you would think popular culture would have exhausted all the options for telling the story of Lizzie Borden, the New England woman who was...

Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.

Mar 9, 2017 — Repertory PicksNext Wednesday afternoon, as part of its Stage on Screen series, the Avon Theatre Film Center, in Stamford, Connecticut, presents one of cinema’s most intimate explorations of theatrical craft, Louis Malle’s 1994 swan song Vanya on 42nd Street. A...