This and That

Jun 30, 2021 — First Person The first thing I’d like to note is that long before I was briefly an usher in a movie theater, my father was briefly an usher in a movie theater. That might not be so much in my...

Apr 13, 2021 — To fall deeply in love means to take a risk, and no romantic movie is riskier than History Is Made at Night (1937). Producer Walter Wanger came up with the very grand and suggestive title, but he had only two...

Apr 8, 2021 — The London-based, British Ghanaian artist and filmmaker Larry Achiampong explores race, class, and history in a multidisciplinary practice that, as described in the biography on his website, seeks to “examine his communal and personal heritage—in particular, the intersection between pop...

Feb 24, 2021 — He never really pushes that cart, does he? Despite the film’s title, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the mournfully persistent protagonist of Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 debut feature, Man Push Cart, is almost always seen pulling his cart through the nighttime streets of...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...

Sep 24, 2020 — As video games have evolved into a technological and economic behemoth, they have attracted some consumer attention and spending away from movies. In part to appeal to filmgoers accustomed to the high production values of the big screen, large-budget games...

Aug 19, 2020 — An atmospheric tale of seduction and dread in Venice, The Comfort of Strangers (1990) came to Paul Schrader as a project in need of a director, with a completed screenplay by Harold Pinter, faithfully adapted from Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel....

Apr 21, 2020 — What happens to the films slated to premiere at Cannes 2020? After all, the fall festival season is beginning to look pretty iffy, too.

Dec 10, 2019 — Wim Wenders has often referred to his Until the End of the World (1991) as the “ultimate road movie,” and even he may not realize how accurate that description has turned out to be. It certainly was, and remains, the...