Christmas Present

Dec 11, 2017 — Before we delve into the city-by-city breakdown, lets note that, following its announcement late last month of its narrative and documentary feature film competition lineups, Slamdance has unveiled the lineups for its Beyond and Shorts programs. Slamdance 2018 will run...

Dec 4, 2017 — Last Wednesday, the Sundance Film Festival unleashed the entire features lineup for its 2018 edition, running from January 18 through 28. Today, the festival’s adding lineups for a new Indie Episodic section as well as its Shorts and Special Events...

Nov 28, 2017 — Ahead of the Christmas Day opening, preview screenings of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in New York and Los Angeles began over the weekend and will continue through Thursday. Variety’s Kristopher Tapley suggests that “if you define a film as...

Oct 17, 2017 — Paul Thomas Anderson’s next film—and very likely Daniel Day-Lewis’s last—now has a release date, Christmas Day, and its own website. In Phantom Thread, Anderson “will once again explore a distinctive milieu of the 20th century. The new movie is a...

Oct 6, 2017 — Back when Projections was still called “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival described its program as a “yearly touchstone for experimental film.” Now neither of those terms—“avant-garde” and “experimental”—are quite broad enough to encompass all that goes...

Jun 30, 2017 — Jonathan Rosenbaum’s posted a revised version of his 1999 essay on the “Origins and Legacy of the Conspiracy Thriller”: “It’s a tradition that harks back to Louis Feuillade’s silent serial of 1915-1916, Les vampires, about a gang of ingenious working-class...

May 23, 2017 — “If you told me you could make a modern Christmas classic largely set outside a doughnut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, centered on transgender prostitutes and shot on iPhones, I wouldn’t have believed you,” begins Ben Kenigsberg at RogerEbert.com. “But...

Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.

Jul 14, 2015 — Carroll Ballard’s film is a work of rapture, a mesmerizing adventure that envelops the viewer in the beauties of the natural world.

Dec 16, 2014 — The prolific and popular Keisuke Kinoshita made his fascinating first movies at a time of great difficulty and censorship, yet their spirit and brilliance shine through.