The Complex

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.

Aug 24, 2020 — “Temporal pincers” aside, this two-and-a-half-hour puzzler may be easier to follow than you might expect.

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...

Jun 9, 2020 — A couple walk down a cacophonous street in New York. They’re bundled in coats—wrapped up in their own worlds. She is incandescent with joy, talking about her cadre of close friends and their regular meetings. He wears a resigned face,...

Jun 27, 2019 — Sergei Bondarchuk pulled out all the stops to bring Tolstoy’s sprawling vision to the screen, and the result remains one of the most extravagant epic films of all time.

May 8, 2018 — Horror movies are often understood as products of the imagination, but in the case of Caroline Monnet and Daniel Watchorn’s work, the conventions of the genre are grounded in stories of real-life injustice. Set in a Canadian residential school for...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Since I saw Faces Places at its premiere at Cannes in May, [Agnès] Varda’s latest documentary has cemented itself on my running list of the year’s best titles,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Made with the French...

Sep 19, 2017 — Film Comment editor Nicolas Rapold has posted his overview of this year’s Venice International Film Festival, and a “Telluride 2017 Journal” from the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez is up there, too. But FC’s gone all out on...

Sep 11, 2017 — In this documentary portrait of the Newport Folk Festival, Murray Lerner captured seismic changes in American music and politics.

Sep 8, 2017 — Right on the heels of his report on this years Venice International Critics Week awards comes Variety’s Nick Vivarelli once again with news from the other independently run program, Venice Days. “Colombian new wave producer-director Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza’s Candelaria, a...