La bienamada

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 14, 2017 — New York. Tomorrow through Wednesday, the Metrograph presents new 35 mm prints of ten features and five shorts as the UCLA Festival of Preservation flies in from the left coast. In the Village Voice, Melissa Anderson previews Howard Alk’s “scalding...

Sep 11, 2017 — “On paper, what could be more sordid than an interview-portrait with Issei Sagawa, the infamous cannibal who became a tabloid sensation in the early 80s after he murdered and ate part of a Dutch woman in Paris?” asks Dan Sullivan...

Sep 11, 2017 — This first of two, possibly three, parts was slammed hard on Twitter the moment it premiered in competition in Venice, but, surveying the first wave of reviews, we find that it’s not going to be so easily dismissed outright. Let’s...

Sep 10, 2017 — “Fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant horror-satire The Death of Stalin,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “It’s a sulphurous black comedy about the backstairs Kremlin intrigue that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953,...

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...

Sep 7, 2017 — Joe Wright (Atonement) will direct Casey Affleck in Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner, reports Variety’s Justin Kroll. “The movie will follow the life of William Stoner, a dirt-poor farmer turned academic, who emerges as an unlikely...

Sep 6, 2017 — When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at Sundance, I gathered a first round of reviews, beginning with Justin Chang’s for the Los Angeles Times: “Adapted from Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound sketches a vivid, dirt-under-the-nails panorama of 1940s Mississippi farm country, centered...

Sep 6, 2017 — New York. Back in April, Film Forum presented The Complete Wiseman: Part 1: Early Wiseman, the first half of a Frederick Wiseman retrospective that, as Matt Prigge notes in the Village Voice, “covered the prolific and pioneering documentarian’s angriest period.”...

Sep 5, 2017 — Frederick Wiseman “is 87 now,” as Tom Charity notes in the new issue of Cinema Scope. “It may be a little presumptuous to suggest he’s reaching for a summation, but it is sure that he’s only making the films he...