Life Sentence

Jan 28, 2022 — Names in the news this week: Asta Nielsen, Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Alexandre Rockwell, James Blue, and Mou Tun-fei.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Aug 17, 2021 — This month we’re reading about Hollywood memoirs, cultural histories, and the revived debate over the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad.

Aug 3, 2021 — With two short films and his acclaimed debut feature, No Data Plan, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Filipino American filmmaker discusses his vision of the immigrant experience.

Jul 14, 2021 — Cannes premieres new work from Mia Hansen-Løve, Wes Anderson, Nanni Moretti, Asghar Farhadi, and Kirill Serebrennikov.

Jul 9, 2021 — A raucous, fast-talking diva, the actor had a remarkable ability to convey both glamour and silliness, a gift that made her the queen of screwball comedy before her untimely death in 1942.

May 28, 2021 — This week: Anarchy on screen, a pre-Code barroom brawl, an essay on Julie Dash, and conversations with Jia Zhangke and Sergei Loznitsa.

May 21, 2021 — Known for her resilient heroines, the prolific Japanese actor finds agency through moments of hesitation in one of her seventeen collaborations with Mikio Naruse.

Apr 22, 2021 — 1. Memories of Murder (2003) is based on what director Bong Joon Ho has described as “the first real case of serial murder in Korea”: between 1986 and 1991, the rural area of Hwaseong was terrorized by the killings of...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...