The State of the World

Jul 26, 2019 — Brought to harrowing life in this film adaptation, George Orwell’s dystopian vision continues to ring true today. But so does his belief in the power of love and hope to overthrow the darkness.

Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...

Apr 17, 2018 — Up at the top, that’s Behnaz Jafari and Jafar Panahi in Panahi’s 3 Faces, which is slated to premiere in Competition in Cannes next month. Film Comment points us to an interview with Panahi in the latest issue of World...

Mar 7, 2018 — A Wrinkle in Time, the adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 science fiction classic, “directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, has been a long time coming,” writes A. O. Scott in the New York...

Feb 20, 2018 — David Bordwell has revisited The Donovan Affair (1929), “Columbia’s first all-talking picture, and Frank Capra’s as well.” It’s “an unusually fluid early talkie” and studying it teaches us “some things about those transitional years 1928-1932, when filmmakers were figuring out...

Dec 13, 2017 — In today’s round, we’re looking not only at the most recent best-of-2017 lists and awards but also new additions to the National Film Registry, the Black List, and more. We begin with Film Comment, where contributors and staff have voted...

Nov 7, 2017 — “Many aspects of time, from the dry precision of date and hour to the flights of remembrance and regret, are distilled in a single scene from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943),” writes...

Nov 2, 2017 — In the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri looks back to the day in 1992 when, as a college freshman, he dropped everything, skipped his classes, and took a train from New Haven to New York to see a movie: Orson Welles’s...

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...

May 27, 2017 — “Some filmmakers rust during periods of inactivity,” begins Guy Lodge in Variety. “Lynne Ramsay arches and tenses, lying in wait like an attack dog. And attack she does, though not in all the expected ways, in her astonishing fourth feature...