Something to Think About

Mar 12, 2021 — This week’s round features Merawi Gerima’s conversation with Ephraim Asili, an early talk with Claire Denis, and the greatest performances of the twenty-first century.

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Aug 18, 2020 — Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s restless, captivating Direct Cinema triumph Town Bloody Hall is a work of oceanography, documenting one splashy moment in the cresting and crashing of American feminism’s second wave. The film chronicles the “Dialogue on Women’s...

Jul 3, 2020 — One Scene By 2008, Olivier Assayas was perhaps best known as a director of fraught, emotionally intense, experimentally structured thrillers such as Irma Vep (1996), demonlover (2002), and Boarding Gate (2007), so the contemplative quiet of the feature he released...

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

Oct 9, 2019 — The Internet’s hardcore feline obsession may seem harmless, but is there something darker at play behind the millions of memes and GIFs it generates, or the eager crowds who gather to meet online animal celebrities like Grumpy Cat (R.I.P.)? In...

Jul 29, 2019 — The late Dutch actor worked with directors as varied as Paul Verhoeven, Ermanno Olmi, Ridley Scott, and Nicolas Roeg.

Mar 29, 2019 — When Carlos Reygadas’s debut film, Japón, came out in 2002, my generation was just starting to drive cars, smoke weed, use contraceptives. A movie ticket at the Cineteca Nacional still cost only twenty pesos then if you showed your student...

Mar 1, 2019 — Claire Simon begins her new documentary The Competition with a shot of young filmmakers chatting outside the locked gates of La Fémis, the most prestigious film school in France, patiently awaiting an opportunity to be judged by a panel of...

Jan 8, 2019 — A few lingering observations on the films of 2018 from Slate’s Movie Club, the New York Times, and more.