The High Note

Feb 2, 2018 — For nearly a decade now, the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville has been a low-key event of high significance to the world of music. Writing about the 2016 edition in the New York Times, Ben Ratliff noted that it “has...

Jan 21, 2018 — “Filmed entirely within an emergency call center, Danish director Gustav Möller’s The Guilty (Den skyldige) is a claustrophobic thriller that finds fascinating ways to transcend, spiritually, its confines,” begins Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Pretty much the whole film...

Jan 11, 2018 — Watch Terry Gilliam’s 1985 future-shock fantasia Brazil, playing tonight at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Oct 12, 2017 — Last week, after years of rumors and aborted attempts to bring it to light, Hollywood’s “open secret” finally became a story fit to print. On Thursday, October 5, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times that...

Oct 5, 2017 — “When you make a movie called Spielberg,” begins Mike Hale in the New York Times, “and its subject agrees to sit for what turns out to be thirty hours of interviews—and his sisters sit down with you, as do his...

Jun 6, 2017 — Combining sardonic humor with poignant characterizations, this cult comedy explores the discontents of two high-school graduates adrift in strip-mall America.

Dec 18, 2016 — Imogen Sara Smith examines the tensions between tradition and modernity reflected in two silent crime films by Yasujiro Ozu and Tomu Uchida.

Jul 23, 2015 — The composer is credited with scoring eleven films for Bergman—among them Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Magician (1958)—the last being The Virgin Spring (1960), with its evocative use of medieval instruments.

Jun 20, 2014 — Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.

Jun 14, 2010 — All writing is travel writing, the axiom goes. And for Jim Jarmusch, perhaps more than any other filmmaker working today, all movies are travel movies. It’s not a slight to call him the epitome of the filmmaker as tourist. In...