The First Beautiful Thing

Feb 17, 2023 — This week: Mike Leigh in the 1980s, a trip to Ghibli Park, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul on virtual reality.

Feb 14, 2020 — One Scene An irresolvable tension between the natural world and scripted narrative crops up throughout the work of German filmmaker Angela Schanelec, including in her latest feature, I Was at Home, But . . . Winner of the best director...

Apr 5, 2017 — At eighty-eight years old, Agnès Varda is still blossoming as an artist. Long known primarily as a filmmaker, a vocation she took up more than half a century ago, the French iconoclast is now in what she gleefully describes as...

Mar 25, 2021 — In With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, an autobiography cowritten by legendary creative and life partners Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Dee tells the story of working as a screenwriter on 1968’s Uptight. It’s a brief account, about...

Jul 27, 2015 — 1. My Beautiful Laundrette launched a number of careers: that of writer Hanif Kureishi, soon to be regarded as one of the most important voices of his generation; those of producers Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, whose then fledgling company, Working...

Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.

Jun 25, 2021 — 1. Visions of Eight (1973) was the brainchild of producer David L. Wolper, whose film The Hellstrom Chronicle won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1972. Other notable credits of his include Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)...

Jun 26, 2017 — 1. Before ever setting foot in front of a camera, Ivor Novello found fame as a music composer in 1914 with his beloved wartime anthem “Keep the Home Fires Burning (’Till the Boys Come Home).” Over a million copies of...

Feb 11, 2022 — The week wraps with swift thrills from Steven Soderbergh and Dominik Graf and fresh appreciations of Louis Malle and Julien Duvivier.