The Debt

May 25, 2017 — “Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary,” begins Jay Weissberg in Variety. “His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy,...

Apr 17, 2026 — From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth...

Jan 1, 2018 — One of the most intriguing films we can look forward to in the new year is Claire Denis’s English-language debut, High Life. “I’ve always been interested in science, in astrophysics,” Denis told the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough in November. “But...

May 17, 2017 — With her son, Felix Moeller (Forbidden Films), Margarethe von Trotta (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Hannah Arendt) will direct the documentary Ingmar Bergman – Legacy of a Defining Genius, reports Variety’s John Hopewell: “Exploring Bergman’s work with his closest...

Mar 8, 2022 — A parable of wayward women in a world without mothers, Márta Mészáros’s 1975 feature catapulted the Hungarian auteur to international prominence.

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...

Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 An artist, critic, and scholar highly respected in his native Iran but too little known in the West, Bahram Beyzaie is a gifted autodidact of traditional and modern theater and performing arts, and...

Mar 21, 2016 — Edward Yang’s masterful 1991 adolescent epic telegraphs the tensions and turbulence of 1960s Taiwan, when youth pop culture and teen street gangs became a major societal force.

May 11, 2021 — When Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, in the summer of 1982, I was almost exactly the same age as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton, getting ready to start my sophomore year in high school. Like Stacy’s world-weary older...

Aug 13, 2020 — First Person In 1960 The Apartment was playing at Cinema Rialto and was advertised with a loud red poster. I was too young to see it at the time, but I do recall overhearing my parents describing it to their...