The Room

May 19, 2021 — For the last twenty years—until the pandemic broke my streak—I drove each fall to spend a week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Before making the trip, I took care to avoid reading anything about the subjects, characters, or...

Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...

Apr 15, 2018 — La Semaine de la Critique, or Critics’ Week, has announced the lineup for its fifty-seventh edition, running from May 9 through 17 in Cannes. The opening film will be Paul Dano’s Wildlife, and I gathered a first round of reviews...

Mar 14, 2018 — We begin with news from the two big festivals of April. SFFILM has now completed the lineup of for this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, running from April 4 through 17 in theaters throughout the Bay Area. 183 films...

Jan 7, 2018 — The updates to the entry on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread are still rolling in, and one of the most recent ones links to Sheila O'Malley’s cover article for the new issue of Film Comment. “Unlike other clichéd Great Men...

Nov 16, 2017 — “Hong Sang-soo has a reputation for being a tricky interview, and he knows it,” writes Darren Hughes in the Notebook. But if anyone can get Hong talking, it’s Hughes. Take a look at this page. Gathered here are some of...

Sep 4, 2017 — Alfred Hitchcock achieved Oscar-winning success with this psychological thriller, a tumultuous collaboration with producer David O. Selznick.

Jul 15, 2017 — “The film’s tag line was ‘They share the same body . . . but hate each other’s guts!’ I was told that the timing was a coincidence, but even before the film began it was clear that this was a...

Jun 13, 2017 — Film Quarterly has not only a new issue but also a new site. In her opening editorial, B. Ruby Rich, who, as noted the other day, will be in London from June 22 through 25 for the series of screenings...

Jun 1, 2017 — Suffused with a quiet radiance, this Kazakh New Wave masterpiece grapples with cultural displacement through an allegorical tale of vengeance.