Like It Never Was Before

Jan 15, 2021 — Songbook 1.There is music in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking that arises from the home itself. It sounds like eddies of conversation around a kitchen counter, as persistent as the crackle of frying oil. It sounds like the patter, so similar...

Jan 12, 2021 — In the course of selling or promoting a film, a director will invariably be asked, “What’s this movie really about?” The desired answer is usually predetermined—marketers want a concise, two-sentence hook; reporters want a sound bite; critics want a thesis...

Dec 10, 2020 — Twenty-four features from around the world offer a remedy for cabin fever.

Nov 20, 2020 — Garrett Bradley, David Fincher, Hayao Miyazaki, George Clooney, Jim Jarmusch, and RZA bring us this week’s highlights.

Nov 18, 2020 — In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), often considered the essay film, we meet the wildcat video game designer Hayao Yamaneko, who imports scenes from his life into his memory machine. The machine is shown only in parts: a slider being...

Nov 10, 2020 — In the half-light of the opening shot of Girlfriends, a woman asks, “What are you doing?” and another responds, “Go back to sleep.” You could dismiss this as a bit of passing dialogue—or you could see in it a larger...

Nov 2, 2020 — Two decades before his inspired turn in Parasite (2019) as a chiseling patriarch—The Man With No Plan—Song Kang-ho became a symbol of new wave South Korean cinema by starring in a pair of iconic films as the movement was beginning...

Oct 30, 2020 — In his tension-filled, black-comic Oscar winner, Bong Joon Ho masterfully mixes tones and subverts genres in order to shine a harsh light on the mechanisms that maintain class inequality.

Oct 26, 2020 — The very first romantic kiss between men on American television happens in Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking film Tongues Untied. That kiss is between two Black men, and one of them is Riggs himself. As of this writing, if you look up...

Oct 20, 2020 — At the start of The Gunfighter, Jimmy Ringo is a man with eleven kills to his name, soon to be twelve. But the only place he actually appears to be very violent, or even very vital, is in other people’s...