The Early Bird

Sep 23, 2020 — From Hitchcock’s orbit to The Architecture of Cinematic Spaces, here’s some of this month’s best writing on new books.

Nov 28, 2023 — Past Lives came out on top in New York, while Stonewalling triumphed in Taipei.

Mar 9, 2023 — This year’s edition retains that SXSW signature mix of boldfaced crowd-pleasers and fresh discoveries.

Feb 5, 2017 — Kirsten Johnson interrogates the thorny ethics of nonfiction filmmaking in her intriguingly elliptical blend of essay, travelogue, and memoir.

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.

Jul 14, 2026 — In May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change. Hud would be Ritt’s ninth feature but his first personal...

Apr 28, 2020 — I first fell in love with Miranda July’s work with her strange, wild, poignant short stories;  her stories led me to her novel  and first two feature films, which I watch so  often that they have over time become spiritual...

Aug 31, 2011 — French sociologist Roger Caillois proposed that every form of human recreation could be placed somewhere on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia. The first of these represents games defined almost wholly by their rule systems. Crossword puzzles and...

Jan 3, 2024 — The new year will bring us new work from Leos Carax, Bong Joon Ho, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Leigh, David Cronenberg, Celine Song . . .

Jan 28, 2019 — With WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the late Serbian director made what Amos Vogel called “one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s.”