Something to Think About

May 17, 2019 — In the news this week: Francis Ford Coppola, Raúl Ruiz, Joanna Hogg, and Lou Ye.

May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...

Mar 19, 2019 — A few weeks after Barbara Loden, the writer, director, and star of Wanda, died at age forty-eight after a long battle with cancer, Elia Kazan, her widower, was interviewed by Marguerite Duras for Cahiers du cinéma. It was 1980, and...

Jan 23, 2019 — Checking in on how the nominees are currently faring with critics and awards prognosticators.

Dec 28, 2018 — Ulysses S. Jenkins’s Two-Zone Transfer By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about...

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...

Jul 4, 2018 — In his big-screen breakthrough, Sam Shepard delivers tenderness, ferocity, and the quiet expressiveness of a silent film star.

Jul 2, 2018 — The sweetness and aggression of female erotic pleasure take center stage in Pussy, an imaginatively stylized animated short now playing on FilmStruck.

Jun 19, 2018 — It keeps happening. At the time of this writing, students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are mourning the deaths of fourteen of their classmates and three faculty members, all of whom a nineteen-year-old is accused of...

Apr 27, 2018 — A survey of the films in this year’s Cannes competition lineup and predictions of what will take home the top prize.