The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty

Mar 10, 2009 — “All movies are political,” the indefatigable Costa-Gavras told Leonard Lopate last week while stopping by his WNYC radio show. As busy and vital as ever, the seventy-six-year-old Greek filmmaker was in town for both the North American premiere of his...

Jan 25, 2009 — Conventional wisdom once held that any European film worth seeing passed through the New York Film Festival. Still, when I first began reviewing movies for the Village Voice in the late seventies, there were some legendary exceptions: Tarkovsky’s The Mirror,...

Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...

Jan 7, 2009 — If you’ve ever wanted to know more about Criterion’s cover designs for the films of Wes Anderson, check out this week’s issue of Time Out Chicago. In “5 Minutes with Ian Dingman,” Jake Malooley interviews the artist who supplied the...

Dec 18, 2008 — Check out Chris Ware’s lovely tribute to Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story on the cover of the November/December Cinefamily calendar. The Cinefamily shows its eclectic (“exceptional, distinctive, weird, and wonderful”) programs at Hollywood’s Silent Movie Theatre, whose co-owner, Sammy Harkham, is...

Dec 17, 2008 — ANew Year’s treat from the Film Society of Lincoln Center: Jacques Tati’s supersized comic odyssey Playtime will be shown in its original, rarely screened 70 mm format at the Walter Reade Theater. If you haven’t seen this visionary work, which...

Dec 10, 2008 — Renowned author, film scholar, and Wong Kar-wai well-wisher David Bordwell takes a peek at the new Criterion edition of Chungking Express on his personal blog. Bordwell, who’s written about the artistry of this dynamic auteur in his books Planet Hong...

Dec 1, 2008 — Today marks the first-ever home video release of Sam Fuller’s controversial, long-unseen antiracist allegory White Dog, the story of an innocent canine trained to attack blacks, and the black animal trainer who tries to cure him. Get a taste of...

Nov 17, 2008 — Marking the publication of two new books on the visionary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, J. Hoberman writes movingly on the artist for Bookforum, beginning with some thoughts on his 1966 epic: “The inventor and master of the Soviet sublime, Tarkovsky...

Nov 11, 2008 — Groundbreaking modernist artist Paul Strand (1890–1976) might have been better known for his photography than his filmmaking, but the two films he directed are both extraordinary testaments to his brilliance. The first, his silent 1921 avant-garde masterpiece Manhatta, a luminous...