The Beginning: Making Episode I

Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...

Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Dec 30, 2021 — Claire Denis, Martin Scorsese, Park Chan-wook, Kelly Reichardt, David Cronenberg, Josephine Decker, Yorgos Lanthimos, Mia Hansen-Løve—the list goes on.

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Jul 2, 2026 — This week’s roundup ranges from sad goodbyes to a silent comedy, from Hitchcock to Barker, and from video art to a cult TV series.

Aug 20, 2024 — In her formally daring debut feature, Martha Coolidge stages a confrontation with the subject of date rape that questions the kind of “closure” required in conventional storytelling.

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...

Jun 21, 2017 — Those lists of twenty-five best films of the twenty-first century (so far) keep coming, and J. Hoberman’s now posted his, too. He’s customized the rules somewhat, and we can be glad: “My single ‘best’ film-object”—Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010)—“is followed...

Sep 1, 2016 — Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention.