Big World

Sep 29, 2017 — New York. The big event in town is, of course, the New York Film Festival, which gets going in earnest today following last night’s premiere of Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying. At the top of the NYFF 2017 Index, I’ve linked to an interview with festival director Kent...

Sep 28, 2017 — “If you’ve never seen The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama about three Navy sailors on a debauched and ultimately tragic road trip, there are several reasons to rectify that,” begins Dana Stevens at Slate. “There’s a devilishly charismatic performance...

Sep 24, 2017 — For the final issue in print of the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri talks with Jonas Mekas, “the 94-year-old filmmaker, artist, critic, poet, photographer, cinema owner, and all-around underground impresario who transformed film criticism, filmmaking, and exhibition throughout the 1960s and...

Sep 22, 2017 — New York. Ben Kenigsberg flags three items in the Times, starting with Art House Theater Day, “a day in which cinemas across the United States and Canada will offer special programming in a show of celebration.” In New York, Thelma...

Sep 21, 2017 — The big “in the works” news today is the release of the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, embedded below. According to the official synopsis from Fox Searchlight, Anderson’s second stop-motion animated feature after Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) “tells...

Sep 21, 2017 — The editors of Senses of Cinema open Issue 84 with a “near exhaustive dossier” on Christian Petzold and a second entitled “Sartre at the Movies.” Here, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of French cinema, Dudley Andrew, explores the ideas...

Sep 20, 2017 — New York. “Like a modern character from Crete’s ancient Minoan culture, trailblazer artist Joan Jonas weaves symbols and media to transfigure feminist and psychological themes,” writes Mónica Savirón for BOMB. “Her work juxtaposes sculpture, painting, film, video, and performance as...

Sep 18, 2017 — 1. The first Newport Folk Festivals took place in 1959 and 1960 and were the result of a collaboration between Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein and Albert Grossman, who at the time were partners in music and artist management....

Sep 18, 2017 — New York. “The Whole World Sings: International Musicals, a weeklong, thirteen-film series at the Quad, is an education in song-and-dance practices outside the Hollywood one,” writes Nick Pinkerton for 4Columns. “René Clair’s Le Million (1931) [image above] is the earliest...

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...