Best Friend

Sep 26, 2017 — Let’s start today’s round with a few books. Next month sees the release of Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Dave Kehr’s followup to his 2011 book, When Movies Mattered. Before he became a curator in the...

Sep 21, 2017 — The big “in the works” news today is the release of the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, embedded below. According to the official synopsis from Fox Searchlight, Anderson’s second stop-motion animated feature after Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) “tells...

Sep 21, 2017 — The editors of Senses of Cinema open Issue 84 with a “near exhaustive dossier” on Christian Petzold and a second entitled “Sartre at the Movies.” Here, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of French cinema, Dudley Andrew, explores the ideas...

Sep 18, 2017 — The wide-open vistas of Montana are the backdrop for three interlocking stories about women confronting the disappointments of small-town life.

Sep 10, 2017 — “Fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant horror-satire The Death of Stalin,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “It’s a sulphurous black comedy about the backstairs Kremlin intrigue that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953,...

Sep 6, 2017 — “Murray Lerner, a seminal music documentary filmmaker of the 60s and 70s, has died at age 90 in New York City,” reports Paula Parisi for Variety. “Lerner won an Oscar for best documentary in 1981 for From Mozart to Mao:...

Sep 4, 2017 — Let’s start with the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin: “‘We all have history,’ shrugs Addie Moore, a widow living in small-town Colorado, when a friend advises that her new beau—a twinklingly handsome widower from a few doors down the street, called Louis...

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...

Sep 1, 2017 — “British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) hits the American highway for this touching, if slightly underwhelming, tale of a troubled boy who strikes up a rapport with an ailing racehorse called Lean on Pete,” begins Time Out’s Dave Calhoun....

Aug 30, 2017 — Paul Schrader’s First Reformed premieres in Competition in Venice before screening in the Masters program in Toronto, and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody finds it to be “a fierce film; Schrader, one of the crucial creators of the modern cinema...