Hard Times

Aug 30, 2017 — “Can there be any clearer signal of reality warping as we hurtle toward imminent apocalypse than the fact that Alexander Payne has made a life-affirming film?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Venice opener Downsizing takes the long road getting...

Aug 29, 2017 — We’re “in dire need of revolutionary narratives,” writes Dan Hassler-Forest. And he grants that a few Hollywood blockbusters have made a stab at it, specifically calling out The Hunger Games, Rogue One, and Mad Max: Fury Road. “But Hollywood’s most...

Aug 26, 2017 — Alexandro Segade covers a lot of ground in his piece for Artforum on Sense8, the Netflix series created by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski which was cancelled this summer but granted one last two-hour episode for tying...

Aug 24, 2017 — Cineaste has posted selections from its fiftieth anniversary issue, along with a round of web exclusives. Louis Menashe, professor emeritus at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and author of Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies, tells the...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...

Aug 10, 2017 — Ian Buruma, who’ll become the new editor of the New York Review of Books next month, has a piece in the new issue on The Memory of Justice, “the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is...

Aug 8, 2017 — This underappreciated highlight of Michael Curtiz’s filmography grapples with postwar disillusionment and marital strife through the prism of a daylight noir.

Aug 7, 2017 — The big news to catch up with here is the launch of Film Critic: Adrian Martin, “almost 20 years, on and off, in the making.” Adrian Martin has been writing essential film criticism for four decades now, and what’s collected...

Aug 3, 2017 — Mónica Delgado, José Sarmiento Hinojosa, and Ivonne Sheen of desistfilm recently “had a chance to enjoy lunch and a nice conversation with Austrian film maverick Peter Tscherkassky and American avant-garde filmmaker Eve Heller, one of the most talented couples in...

Jul 31, 2017 — Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in...