Every Man for Himself

Nov 22, 2017 — We begin with the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time, Chris Wisniewski’s, on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971). The focus here is on “a sequence that seems at first ordinary and unravels under scrutiny,...

Nov 12, 2017 — In Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, Nancy Schoenberger “has hidden a provocative thesis,” suggests Stephen Metcalf, writing for the Atlantic. “She asks us to remember the beauty of masculine self-mastery as...

Oct 20, 2017 — New York. We opened yesterday’s entry on goings on here and there with a round on MoMA’s series Strange Illusions: Poverty Row Classics Preserved by UCLA, currently running through October 28. We need to again today, because Farran Nehme Smith...

Oct 10, 2017 — Mia Hansen-Løve is about to begin shooting her sixth feature, Maya, featuring Roman Kolinka (who's worked with Hansen-Løve on Eden, andThings to Come), Aarshi Banerjee, Alex Descas, Judith Chemla, and Johanna ter Steege. Fabien Lemercier reports for Cineuropa: “Written by...

Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...

Oct 5, 2017 — This is the documentary that put an end to Steven Spielberg’s plans to produce a narrative feature—to be directed by Sam Mendes—based on Gay Talese’s book, The Voyeur’s Motel. Spielberg had bought the rights after the New Yorker ran an...

Oct 2, 2017 — New York. “There could be no better film to open the Flaherty NYC Presents: Out from Under series playing at Anthology Film Archives tonight than A Litany for Survival [1996], the lovely and inspiring portrait on one of the twentieth century’s ultimate warriors: Audre Lorde.” Sonya Redi at...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Sean Baker follows his 2015 breakout feature Tangerine with another high-energy movie about people whose imaginations are undaunted by living on the margins,” begins Amy Taubin, introducing her interview with the director for Film Comment. “In The Florida Project, six-year-old...

Sep 30, 2017 — “It would seem that curators have replaced bankers as the villains du jour,” writes Jörg Heiser in a piece for frieze that addresses, among other showdowns, one here in Berlin that’s just resulted in the police clearing out occupiers from...

Sep 19, 2017 — Last year, Dmitry Golotyuk and Antonina Derzhitskaya spoke with Jean-Luc Godard for the Russian publication Séance, and now Craig Keller has translated nine excerpts. The conversation evidently took place in Rolle, the modest town in Switzerland with a population of...