The High Note

Oct 14, 2017 — Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel is “a passionate comedic drama that unfolds some of the tones of Allen’s youth,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “It’s set in the early nineteen-fifties, in Coney Island, and Allen lends the drama a structure...

Apr 24, 2012 — Among the most widely seen photographs of Hollis Frampton is one of him as a young man, a self-portrait taken in 1959, if we are to trust the narration he composed to accompany its inclusion in his 1971 film (nostalgia)....

Apr 2, 2021 — More mysteries from Rian Johnson plus notes on forthcoming films from Steven Spielberg, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Alma Har’el, and more.

Sep 3, 2018 — The producers behind our edition of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece share stories they discovered from researching the film and the turbulent political climate that inspired it.

Apr 15, 2020 — 1.In 1944, after an intense bidding war, Twentieth Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck acquired the film rights to Ben Ames Williams’s Leave Her to Heaven for $100,000, then an exorbitant price for an unpublished work. Later that year, Williams’s mystery...

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...

Jun 21, 2022 — The producer of our edition of the masterful 1987 melodrama tells the stories of some of director Stanley Kwan’s legendary collaborators, including superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung.

Apr 29, 2020 — Perched high above the spa town of Nebelsbad, amid the snow-capped Alpine peaks of the Republic of Zubrowka, sits a sprawling resort that in its old-world heyday served as the epitome of European luxury. For the historical caper The Grand...

Apr 16, 2019 — In a Lonely Place (1950), screening Friday at MoMA, and The Big Heat (1953), featured on the Criterion Channel, score high on Slant’s list of top noirs.

Jul 22, 2016 — Two pieces, written by director King Hu, that were originally published as part of a 1975 press kit for the Cannes Film Festival.