The Idea of You

Nov 12, 2019 — The Daytrippers came out in theaters in 1997, back when I was in graduate school at NYU. That was a year when you could rent videotapes everywhere—at Blockbuster, but also at a Laundromat or a bodega. There were still phone booths...

May 28, 2019 — Songbook Some songs are so beautiful that it takes six or seven or fifty listens before you really hear the words. High on the list of the greatest American songwriters, Jerome Kern crafted many such melodies: perfect enough to momentarily...

Apr 17, 2018 — The seventeenth Tribeca Film Festival opens tonight in New York with Love, Gilda, Lisa D’Apolito’s portrait of beloved comic actress Gilda Radner, and screens around one hundred more features before wrapping on April 29. Throughout the festival’s run, I’ll be...

Mar 3, 2018 — So this is the weekend that finally brings awards season to an end. The Film Independent Spirit Awards will be presented tonight (and here’s an overview of the nominations), and tomorrow’s the Big Night (again, the nominations). The one piece...

Feb 8, 2018 — “Is there a full-length feature film in the dramatic but blink-and-it’s-over incident of three young Americans subduing a heavily armed terrorist determined to kill as many people as possible on a Paris-bound fast train two years ago?” asks the Hollywood...

Oct 8, 2017 — Lady Bird screens at the New York Film Festival this evening and tomorrow night, and we begin with Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay: “Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with this controlled, coolly compassionate and autobiographical-feeling post-9/11 teenage tale. Saoirse Ronan plays...

Aug 11, 2017 — With his controversial new film Nocturama opening in theaters, French director Bertrand Bonello spoke with us about what inspires him as an artist and how he blurs the line between realism and abstraction.

Jul 18, 2017 — With a weeklong run of our new restoration of Desert Hearts opening at the IFC Center in New York, we spoke with director Donna Deitch about this landmark of LGBT filmmaking.

Jul 17, 2017 — “Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles,” reports Anita Gates...

Jun 14, 2017 — A tireless explorer of cinema’s discarded past, Bill Morrison brings his unique approach to found-footage filmmaking to his latest project, a documentary about lost reels of nitrate film found in Canada’s Yukon Territory.