A Big Family

Nov 30, 2017 — New York. With The Non-Actor, a Film Society of Lincoln Center series programmed by Dennis Lim and Thomas Beard, running through December 10, J. Hoberman writes a brief but rich history of the notion for the New York Review of...

Nov 22, 2017 — We begin with the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time, Chris Wisniewski’s, on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971). The focus here is on “a sequence that seems at first ordinary and unravels under scrutiny,...

Oct 26, 2017 — New York. A new restoration of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Daughter of the Nile (1987) opens at the Quad tomorrow. In the New York Times, J. Hoberman notes that it was “produced by a music company as a vehicle for the Taiwanese...

Sep 28, 2017 — “If you’ve never seen The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama about three Navy sailors on a debauched and ultimately tragic road trip, there are several reasons to rectify that,” begins Dana Stevens at Slate. “There’s a devilishly charismatic performance...

Aug 12, 2017 — The International Jury of this year’s Locarno Festival, presided over by Olivier Assayas and including Jean-Stéphane Bron, Miguel Gomes, Christos Konstantakopoulos, and Birgit Minichmayr, has awarded the Golden Leopard to Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang—we’ve gathered reviews here. “I’ve been working...

Aug 11, 2017 — “Mrs. Fang is a study of a face and a sober essay on death,” writes Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. “It’s also about fishing. As profoundly moving as it is troubling, this new masterwork from documentary filmmaker Wang Bing...

Jun 21, 2017 — Billing itself as “the world's longest continually-running film festival,” the Edinburgh International Film Festival opens its 71st edition today with Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, one of five films Alistair Harkness recommends from the lineup in the Scotsman: “Already described...

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Jun 9, 2017 — “The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century. So Far.” Frankly, this time of year, my cursor tends to fly right over a headline like that, having worn itself out on such lists from Thanksgiving through Oscar Night. But this...

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...