† This is the Life

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Oct 8, 2017 — Lady Bird screens at the New York Film Festival this evening and tomorrow night, and we begin with Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay: “Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with this controlled, coolly compassionate and autobiographical-feeling post-9/11 teenage tale. Saoirse Ronan plays...

Oct 4, 2017 — Starting today, and on through October 15, the sixty-first BFI London Film Festival will present over 240 features—premieres, revivals, and hand-picked highlights from the year’s festival calendar so far—and nearly 130 short films. Our guide here won’t—can’t—be complete, but with...

Sep 17, 2017 — “Clio Barnard is the fiercely intelligent, visually inventive and innovative film-maker who gave us the brilliant docu-hybrid The Arbor and then The Selfish Giant, an inspired interpretation of Oscar Wilde set in Bradford,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Her third...

Sep 8, 2017 — “A complex and layered work, [Jonas Mekas’s] Lost Lost Lost [1976]—especially its first hour—is among cinema’s most poignant accounts of the immigrant experience,” writes Girish Shambu. “Historically, the best immigration cinema stages, in an astonishing multitude of ways, a divided...

Aug 31, 2017 — The forty-fourth Telluride Film Festival runs from September 1 through 4, and this entry will serve as an index to the coverage of the coverage. For Variety, Kristopher Tapley talks with TFF executive director Julie Huntsinger, noting “the prevalence of...

Aug 22, 2017 — BBC Culture has polled 253 film critics from fifty-two countries to come up with a list of the “100 greatest comedies of all time.” Nicholas Barber argues the case for the film that’s come out on top, Billy Wilder’s Some...

Jul 31, 2017 — Jeanne Moreau, who appeared in over 130 films over a period of sixty-five years and was declared “the greatest actress in the world” by none other than Orson Welles, has passed away in Paris at the age of eighty-nine. She...

Jul 10, 2017 — “While many of my more memorable screenings involved companions and cohorts—seeing Barbarella on a second date with the woman I’d eventually marry; catching a revival of Andrei Rublev with a friend as an elderly Russian lady noisily ate stinky borscht...

Jun 30, 2017 — Starting today, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Subway Cinema present the sixteenth edition of New York Asian Film Festival, running through July 13 at the Walter Reade Theater and then from July 14 through 16 at the SVA...