Madame Racketeer

Jan 23, 2018 — Last week we saw the first four titles lined up for this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week, the independent program that, like its counterparts in Cannes and Venice, runs parallel to its city’s big festival, the Berlinale. Below, an overview; you...

Jan 17, 2018 — “My appreciation for his inspiring and innovative cinema grows deeper as the years go by,” writes Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa in an essay that Jonathan Rosenbaum’s posted on his site, “Reflections on Kiarostami’s Two-Way Mirrors.” A new and expanded edition of their...

Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...

Jan 10, 2018 — Before looking back on the highlights of his 2017 in an entry for Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov has a note or two on attending the recent New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner: The very concept of a critics’ award ceremony...

Jan 7, 2018 — The updates to the entry on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread are still rolling in, and one of the most recent ones links to Sheila O'Malley’s cover article for the new issue of Film Comment. “Unlike other clichéd Great Men...

Jan 6, 2018 — New York. The Metrograph is currently presenting seven films by Max Ophuls and, in the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri argues that it’s “essential” to see his work on the big screen. “His characters were often women—women scorned, women in love,...

Dec 30, 2017 — Cinema lost a few giants this year, some soldiers, some heroes, duly heralded or not, and links from a good number of the names here will take you to collections of remembrances. I’ve also added notes and a few more...

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Dec 4, 2017 — Over the weekend, word began coursing through social media that Ulli Lommel had passed away at the age of seventy-three. Now Doris Kuhn confirms in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the actor and director known to most for his work with...

Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...