This Is It

Jan 21, 2018 — “In a festival that rarely wants for political currency,” writes Justin Chang in a dispatch from Sundance to the Los Angeles Times, “it’s surely no coincidence that Blindspotting and Monsters and Men, the first two films to screen in this...

Jan 20, 2018 — We begin with April Wolfe, writing for Film Comment and introducing us to Maxim Pozdorovkin and Our New President, which “tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, constructed almost...

Nov 12, 2017 — On November 4, almost a month to the day after Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times on the accusations of sexual harassment and abuse leveled against Harvey Weinstein, Mark Harris tweeted: “Thing I've been hearing...

Sep 29, 2017 — “A ravishing visual colossus, Blade Runner 2049 more than lives up to its predecessor’s legacy as a groundbreaking mixture of sound, images and mood,” begins Screen’s Tim Grierson. “This long-anticipated sequel’s screenplay sometimes struggles to keep pace, but director Denis...

Sep 4, 2017 — “Lebanon director Samuel Maoz went in a risky direction by making a film as different and daring as Foxtrot,” writes Jay Weissberg for Variety, “and his boldness pays off in ways that make one reach for superlatives. Not content to...

Sep 3, 2017 — “With writer-director James Toback, you never know quite what you’re going to get, quality-wise,” writes Glenn Kenny at RogerEbert.com. “What you do know you’re going to get is something very indicative of the personality of James Toback—defiant, searching, self-indulgent, absurdist,...

Sep 1, 2017 — “A single slur becomes the lightning rod for a court case that grips but also bitterly divides a nation in The Insult, the latest feature from Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri (The Attack),” begins Boyd van Hoeij in the Hollywood Reporter....

Jul 27, 2017 — Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbara has presented the lineup for the seventy-fourth edition (August 30 through September 9) at a press conference in Rome. I’ve gathered notes and trailers.CompetitionAi Weiwei’s Human Flow. From the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel:...

Jul 10, 2017 — “While many of my more memorable screenings involved companions and cohorts—seeing Barbarella on a second date with the woman I’d eventually marry; catching a revival of Andrei Rublev with a friend as an elderly Russian lady noisily ate stinky borscht...

May 22, 2017 — “Michael Haneke is back to many of his old tricks in Happy End, which enfolds the child psychopathy of Benny’s Video, the bourgeois nightmare of Hidden, the euthanasia theme of Amour, and the racial discomfort of Code Unknown into a...