Face to Face with Death

Sep 20, 2017 — New York. “Like a modern character from Crete’s ancient Minoan culture, trailblazer artist Joan Jonas weaves symbols and media to transfigure feminist and psychological themes,” writes Mónica Savirón for BOMB. “Her work juxtaposes sculpture, painting, film, video, and performance as...

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...

Sep 10, 2017 — “Hirokazu Kore-eda is best known for intimate family dramas that overseas critics often compare to the work of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63), the genre’s unquestioned master,” writes Mark Schilling, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for the Japan Times. “Kore-eda rejects...

Sep 1, 2017 — “British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) hits the American highway for this touching, if slightly underwhelming, tale of a troubled boy who strikes up a rapport with an ailing racehorse called Lean on Pete,” begins Time Out’s Dave Calhoun....

Jul 25, 2017 — “So,” wrote Chris Marker in 2003, looking back on his school days, “with scissors, glue and crystal paper, I made a faithful copy of the actual Pathéorama reel. After that, frame by frame, I began to draw a series of...

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...

Jul 6, 2017 — We open today’s round, considerably briefer than yesterday’s, with Ridley Scott double feature—of sorts. Movie City News alerts us to an article by Scott himself that originally appeared in the August 1979 issue of American Cinematographer: “I felt that Alien...

Jun 23, 2017 — Reporting on last year’s edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato for Film Comment, Dan Sullivan called the festival “a rare beast indeed: a one-week, primarily repertory film festival, mind-bogglingly dense with new restorations, legendary prints, discoveries and rediscoveries, canonical works presented...

May 21, 2017 — Tonight, Sunday, May 21, 2017, Twin Peaks returns, just as Laura Palmer (may have) predicted it would twenty-five years ago, give or take. Eighteen one-hour episodes, all directed by David Lynch and cowritten with the show’s original co-creator, Mark Frost....

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...