A Perfect Ending

Nov 10, 2020 — In the half-light of the opening shot of Girlfriends, a woman asks, “What are you doing?” and another responds, “Go back to sleep.” You could dismiss this as a bit of passing dialogue—or you could see in it a larger...

Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...

May 18, 2020 — It’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Frances Marion. The story of the screenwriter’s career is entwined with the story of Hollywood itself, from its pioneer days to the Golden Age. Part of Marion’s skill as a writer was how her...

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...

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...

Mar 1, 2018 — “His face did something to me. Or, rather, the film, with its compassion and its utterly jarring ending, which I won’t give away, did something to me. But, then again, you could also say that, in some sense, the film...

Dec 12, 2017 — “Evil is ascendant,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “The Resistance—an intrepid, multi-everything group whose leaders include a battle-tested woman warrior—has been fighting the good fight for years but is outnumbered and occasionally outmaneuvered. Yes, the latest Star...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Sean Baker follows his 2015 breakout feature Tangerine with another high-energy movie about people whose imaginations are undaunted by living on the margins,” begins Amy Taubin, introducing her interview with the director for Film Comment. “In The Florida Project, six-year-old...

Jul 24, 2017 — “It seems, at first, like an impossible caper,” begins Jordan Hoffman, writing for the Guardian. “Can Steven Soderbergh bring something new to the heist genre after his outstanding Oceans trilogy? The answer, as always, is to have faith in the...

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...