Back Stage

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...

May 30, 2017 — Lino Brocka brought an invigoratingly personal and socially conscious vision to Philippine cinema with this gritty portrait of Manila barrio life.

May 30, 2017 — Manhattan’s Quad Cinema reopened last month with a series of events that highlighted the emotional immediacy that comes with the experience of watching movies for the first time.

May 27, 2017 — “When French writer Delphine le Vigan published her book Based on a True Story in 2015, some critics dubbed it ‘a Hitchcockian novel,’” begins Jonathan Romney, writing for Screen. “It’s not surprising, then, that Roman Polanski’s adaptation is very Hitchcockian...

May 26, 2017 — Today’s second Competition entry is Fatih Akin’s In the Fade, and we begin with the A.V. Club’s A. A. Dowd: “Diane Kruger stars as Katja, a woman whose husband, a Turkish immigrant, and son, who’s only six, are killed in...

May 26, 2017 — “After a foray into relatively restrained period filmmaking in the recent, World War I-set Frantz, François Ozon is back to his old tricks—and really, who's complaining?” asks Jon Frosch in the Hollywood Reporter. “Premiering in competition at Cannes, the French...

May 25, 2017 — “Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary,” begins Jay Weissberg in Variety. “His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy,...

May 25, 2017 — In Tuesday’s dispatch to the Village Voice from the Cannes Film Festival, Bilge Ebiri wrote about one of the best films he’d seen so far, The Rider, “directed by Chloé Zhao (whom I interviewed). It follows a young rodeo cowboy...

May 25, 2017 — “The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has ever a heist gone quite so wrong to quite such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Bouncing wildly...

May 25, 2017 — “It’s baffling that Jacques Doillon’s Rodin was granted one of the main-competition slots,” writes Manohla Dargis in her latest dispatch from the Cannes Film Festival back to the New York Times. “A handsomely mounted waxworks, it might have made sense...