The Family Friend

Apr 24, 2019 — When It Rains Charles Burnett has long been recognized by historians as one of the greatest American film directors, and he’s won numerous important awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2017. Nevertheless, he is still relatively unknown beyond the world...

Dec 4, 2018 — Twelve episodic works and seventy-three shorts will premiere in Park City, while Rotterdam shines its spotlight on Parajanov and Godard.

Jan 10, 2018 — Before looking back on the highlights of his 2017 in an entry for Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov has a note or two on attending the recent New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner: The very concept of a critics’ award ceremony...

Sep 6, 2017 — When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at Sundance, I gathered a first round of reviews, beginning with Justin Chang’s for the Los Angeles Times: “Adapted from Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound sketches a vivid, dirt-under-the-nails panorama of 1940s Mississippi farm country, centered...

Jun 12, 2017 — “As incredible as it seems,” write Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin in the new issue of Sight & Sound, “Philippe Garrel, at the precocious age of 16, had already sketched most of the now familiar elements of his cinematic...

Oct 12, 2010 — One Every movie is two stories: the one it tells and the one that remains to be told about it by those involved in its creation. These two narratives converge in a certain current of the cinema of the past...

Jan 11, 1994 — A harrowing nightmare about life in inner-city hell, this 1993 sleeper-hit is a powerhouse filmmaking debut by the Hughes brothers.

Jun 9, 2021 — Lois Weber was Hollywood’s leading female director in the 1910s and 1920s. But also: she was one of the great directors of the silent era regardless of gender, a filmmaker of remarkable vision who exerted an exceptional degree of creative...

Mar 8, 2021 — “I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant...

Aug 27, 2020 — In his novel All the Rest Have Died (1964), about his experience as a young actor in New York, Bill Gunn wrote, “I was always only slightly aware of the injustice the Black artist suffers while trying to create in...