Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary

Apr 13, 2021 — To fall deeply in love means to take a risk, and no romantic movie is riskier than History Is Made at Night (1937). Producer Walter Wanger came up with the very grand and suggestive title, but he had only two...

Mar 13, 2020 — Maybe in tough times we can draw strength from our passion for great cinema.

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Nov 15, 2019 — It’s a strange feeling: adoring cinema while at the same time always sensing that it’s not made for you. This is how I felt growing up, at least. I came of age watching movies, crushing on them so hard that...

Feb 11, 2019 — Renowned as an actors’ filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman directed some of cinema’s greatest performances, many of them by a highly talented troupe of frequent collaborators, including Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and others. But even amid the...

Apr 16, 2018 — From Éditions Matière comes Contrebandes Godard 1960-1968, a collection of promotional materials inspired by comics and the Situationists for the films Godard made during those years, unpublished since but now gathered and commented on by Pierre Pinchon, who teaches at...

Feb 27, 2018 — Director Tony Richardson refracts the bawdy spirit of the 1960s through this brilliantly distilled take on an eighteenth-century picaresque.

Aug 30, 2017 — “You could argue that [Janicza Bravo’s] Lemon thinks too much about its own face, its style over its substance,” writes Niela Orr for the Baffler, “but it does so in service of its critique of white male narcissism. To this...

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...

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.