The House Is Black

Jan 13, 2021 — About a decade ago, I went to see Welcome, or No Trespassing at Spectacle. It’s still the only time I’ve known anyone to project the movie, a 1964 satire of Soviet summer camps that was the debut feature of Elem...

Nov 13, 2020 — We’re keeping busy with online festivals, awards nominations, remembrances, and plenty of weekend reading.

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Jan 8, 2020 — When it comes to building a genuine relationship between characters on-screen, how do you capture the feeling of a shared history? How much begins with what’s written on the page, and how much relies on the chemistry between actors or...

Sep 4, 2019 — The late actor became an icon of his generation with this moody, brilliant non-performance, informed by his intimate knowledge of chaos and death.

Jun 14, 2019 — Starting this weekend, Janus Films is putting Jennie Livingston’s extraordinary snapshot of Harlem’s drag balls of the 1980s back on the big screen.

Jun 8, 2018 — San Francisco’s festival of experimental film prompts a new taxonomy from Michael Sicinski.

Apr 18, 2018 — Before we lost Milos Forman and Vittorio Taviani over the weekend, the Slovak Spectator reported that Juraj Herz, the Czech actor and director best known for his 1968 film The Cremator, had passed away at the age of eighty-three. Just...

Mar 12, 2018 — After Paula Prentiss, who’s recently turned eighty, had a nervous breakdown on the set of What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), she “didn’t turn up in another movie until Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1970), by which time Hollywood had changed to the point...

Sep 11, 2017 — In this documentary portrait of the Newport Folk Festival, Murray Lerner captured seismic changes in American music and politics.