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Mar 12, 2021 — Deep Dives I can think of few movies that express the pain of being young better than Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kobo Abe’s Ako (1964). I first happened upon it by chance, lurking among the supplements on the Criterion edition of...

Mar 3, 2021 — Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Dénes Nagy’s Natural Light compete at the Berlinale.

Feb 26, 2021 — First Person When I was eight years old, I discovered what it meant to be of two minds. I didn’t discover this in any intellectual way; this was brought to bear on me in 1973 because that’s the year my...

Feb 26, 2021 — There would be no Indonesian cinema without Usmar Ismail (1921–71). His third feature, The Long March (Darah dan doa, 1950), was not only the first film to be produced by a fully Indonesian crew and production company but also one...

Feb 24, 2021 — He never really pushes that cart, does he? Despite the film’s title, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the mournfully persistent protagonist of Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 debut feature, Man Push Cart, is almost always seen pulling his cart through the nighttime streets of...

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Feb 23, 2021 — Here’s the latest on projects coming from Todd Haynes, Chloé Zhao, David Cronenberg, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Claire Denis.

Feb 19, 2021 — It was the early sixties, and Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Delphine Seyrig were the stars in our sky. When I first met Jean-Claude Carrière, about fifty-five years ago—he was thirty, I was twenty-three—we were working on the...

Feb 16, 2021 — Reviews are strong for the biography of the unique theater and film director, comedian and actor.

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...