The Black Ghiandola

Sep 25, 2017 — New York. From October 12 through 26, the Metrograph will present Philippe Garrel: Part 1, the first half of the most complete retrospective ever to be staged in the U.S. I’m flagging this event early not only because the New...

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,...

Aug 19, 2017 — “So about Logan Lucky: I knew in the first shot that I was going to love this movie,” Amy Taubin tells Steven Soderbergh during her interview with him for Film Comment. “I call it the three-shot rule,” says Soderbergh. “After...

Aug 12, 2017 — The International Jury of this year’s Locarno Festival, presided over by Olivier Assayas and including Jean-Stéphane Bron, Miguel Gomes, Christos Konstantakopoulos, and Birgit Minichmayr, has awarded the Golden Leopard to Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang—we’ve gathered reviews here. “I’ve been working...

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...

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...

Jun 9, 2017 — “The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century. So Far.” Frankly, this time of year, my cursor tends to fly right over a headline like that, having worn itself out on such lists from Thanksgiving through Oscar Night. But this...

Jun 1, 2017 — “The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer,” writes Martin Scorsese in the new issue of the TLS. “They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but,...

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...

May 25, 2017 — “It’s baffling that Jacques Doillon’s Rodin was granted one of the main-competition slots,” writes Manohla Dargis in her latest dispatch from the Cannes Film Festival back to the New York Times. “A handsomely mounted waxworks, it might have made sense...