Blacksmithing Scene

Oct 28, 2019 — One Scene In Nadav Lapid’s latest film, the award-winning Synonyms, a young man moves from Tel Aviv to Paris to make a clean break from his Israeli identity. This drastic attempt at self-reinvention is something that Lapid himself endeavored in his...

Sep 18, 2019 — One Scene The way some rock fans talk about the sanctity of live music, you’d think it was a guaranteed path to transcendence. But of course most concerts fall far short of the sublime, and the thrill of breathing in...

Aug 21, 2019 — One Scene One of my absolute favorite quotes from Douglas Sirk—and he has a million of ’em—was made in reference to Magnificent Obsession. “It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness,” he said (this isn’t the quote quite...

Jun 12, 2019 — One Scene One of the most talked-about movies at this year’s Sundance, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is both a rhapsodic portrait of first-time director Joe Talbot’s native city and a mournful look at how gentrification, income inequality,...

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...

Apr 10, 2019 — One Scene Dušan Makavejev’s boundary-pushing 1974 film Sweet Movie gleefully skewers the forces of social oppression with a twisted double narrative and Day-Glo scenarios. At a time when the director’s native Yugoslavia was carving out a unique position somewhere between the political...

Mar 18, 2019 — One Scene When Jia Zhangke made his 1997 feature debut, Xiao Wu, he was rebelling against decades of tradition that had drawn a hard line between cinema and reality. Chinese film history is rooted in genres found in classical theater...

Oct 22, 2018 — With her a capella take on the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By,” the singer turns a brief moment in one of Godard’s most playful films into a reflection on loss.

Aug 23, 2018 — The director of Computer Chess and Support the Girls finds in John Cassavetes a surrealist whose weirdest set pieces could make David Lynch blush.

Oct 8, 2026 — Having achieved fame for her work in On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, Saint insisted on putting her private family life first.