Fantasia

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...

Jul 27, 2020 — The first shot of Atom Egoyan’s 1984 debut feature, Next of Kin, is a ground-level pan across the baggage claim section at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The camera is angled so that our gaze is on the various pieces of luggage...

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...

Apr 24, 2019 — Channel Calendars The Women (1939) It’s going to be a packed month on the Criterion Channel, with a spotlight on the unforgettable female characters of a classic Hollywood master, a tribute to the great Japanese cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, a new...

Nov 3, 2017 — “The return of Twin Peaks in 2017 came like a Taser shock to the ‘golden age of television,’ overturning audience expectations for what Twin Peaks—and TV—could encompass, both in narrative and form,” writes Aliza Ma in the new issue of...

Aug 17, 2017 — The New York Film Festival has announced the lineup for its Projections section, running from October 6 through 9: Eight features and eight shorts programs, fifty-one films in all. The Film Society of Lincoln Center notes that eighteen works will...

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Sep 19, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s tale of love and devilry in medieval France was a sensation during the German occupation.

Dec 6, 2009 — Jim Ellis’s insightful new book, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (University of Minnesota Press), builds from the premise that “Jarman is the mostimportant Anglo-American gay director in the post-Stonewall era, although it is surprising that, to my knowledge, no one has ever...