The Land

May 19, 2021 — For the last twenty years—until the pandemic broke my streak—I drove each fall to spend a week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Before making the trip, I took care to avoid reading anything about the subjects, characters, or...

Apr 29, 2021 — Seven features in this year’s New Directors/New Films lineup premiered in Rotterdam’s Tiger competition.

Apr 22, 2020 — Deep Dives The Forest for the Trees, by German filmmaker Maren Ade, is one of the deepest depictions of loneliness on-screen. After serving as a television producer and shooting two shorts, Ade made this first feature, based on her own...

Dec 20, 2019 — This week we’re spotlighting directors’ and writers’ appreciations of other directors and writers, plus Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda.

Dec 19, 2019 — Lists (of course), but also philosophical surveys, biographies, and coffee table books are featured in this month’s round.

Dec 4, 2019 — Songbook Midway through Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), the plot pivots on a song. “You’ve got some weird shit in here,” says Joanne (Kierston Wareing,), riffling through the CDs in her new boyfriend’s car. It’s the morning after a boozy...

Nov 12, 2019 — The Daytrippers came out in theaters in 1997, back when I was in graduate school at NYU. That was a year when you could rent videotapes everywhere—at Blockbuster, but also at a Laundromat or a bodega. There were still phone booths...

Oct 31, 2019 — A series of films by one of India’s greatest and most fiercely independent directors opens in New York.

Aug 16, 2019 — In making her nonfiction film The Inland Sea (1991), a poetic chronicle of a journey around the Japanese islands of the eponymous body of water, director Lucille Carra relied on a tried-and-true itinerary. A 1971 travelogue by Donald Richie, also...

Jul 18, 2019 — With its picturesque Provençal village, florid theatrical dialogue, and cast of familiar southern-French actors, dominated by the formidable Raimu, The Baker’s Wife is classic Marcel Pagnol territory. In 1938, when the film was released, the feted author and playwright was...