And Then There Was Light

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Nov 26, 2018 — The Magnificent Ambersons In his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich published as This Is Orson Welles, Welles speaks nostalgically of the time he spent with his father in a tranquil enclave of 1920s Illinois, comparing it to “a childhood back in...

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

May 20, 2018 — A lifelong movie collector remembers the thrill of discovering the granddaddy of all monsters on Super 8.

Apr 10, 2018 — In the run-up to the release of Zama on Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York is presenting a retrospective of work by Lucrecia Martel. Starting tonight and on through Friday, Martel will be there to either...

Apr 5, 2018 — Locarno in Los Angeles, the series curated by Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk and co-artistic director Robert Koehler that brings a batch of the best films screened last summer at the increasingly vital Swiss festival, opens today and runs through...

Apr 5, 2018 — “Just a few years in and DOC10 is already a must-hit stop on the festival circuit for the year’s best documentaries,” writes Lisa Trifone in the Third Coast Review. “The brainchild of Chicago Media Project and head programmer Anthony Kaufman,...

Apr 2, 2018 — Updates are still coming into the first entry on this year’s New Directors/New Films running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This entry will take us all the way through...