The Present

Jan 31, 2018 — “Originality has never been a problem for documentarian Robert Greene, whose films Actress and Kate Plays Christine have freely crossed the lines between fly-on-the-wall realism and overt artificiality,” writes Noel Murray for the Week. “Bisbee ’17 is Greene’s masterwork. Shot...

Jan 21, 2018 — “After innumerable plays, books, films, made-for-TV series and specials, and even an opera and a musical, you would think popular culture would have exhausted all the options for telling the story of Lizzie Borden, the New England woman who was...

Dec 13, 2017 — In today’s round, we’re looking not only at the most recent best-of-2017 lists and awards but also new additions to the National Film Registry, the Black List, and more. We begin with Film Comment, where contributors and staff have voted...

Nov 10, 2017 — New York. “The star of Lost Landscapes of New York is the city itself—or rather the city of dreams and memories,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Created by the archivist Rick Prelinger, this wondrous compilation turns old...

Oct 27, 2017 — New York. Hank and Jim, running at Film Forum from today through November 16, is a companion series to Scott Eyman’s new book, Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart. Today “offers back-to-back Hitchcock movies,”...

Oct 4, 2017 — We begin with Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker about Alain Gomis’s Félicité, “a dramatic portrait of a fierce, intrepid woman—a single mother and a powerfully expressive cabaret singer (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) in Kinshasa who is wrenched from...

Sep 5, 2017 — “If the only thing we wanted, or expected, a horror film to do was to get a rise out of you—to make your eyes widen and your jaw drop, to leave you in breathless chortling spasms of WTF disbelief—then Darren...

Aug 23, 2017 — We’re opening today’s entry with the “goings on” items because today’s must-read comes from Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. He assures us that he’s “not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been waiting most of my life to see...

Jun 21, 2017 — The interview of the day, hands down, dates back half a century. Via Movie City News comes word that American Cinematographer has posted Herb A. Lightman’s interview with Alfred Hitchcock, which originally ran in its May 1967 issue. What makes...

May 24, 2017 — “Cinema lost one of its pre-eminent pioneers when Abbas Kiarostami died on July 4, 2016,” writes Giovanni Marchini Camia at the Film Stage, where he notes that 24 Frames “was as good as finished” at the time of his passing....