The award-winning writer and director of Tótem shares her love for Aki Kaurismäki’s “strange, funny filmmaking spirit,” dedicates her selection of Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides to her mom, and talks about Werner Herzog as a “warrior” in Burden...

Apr 17, 2024 — Three of this month’s programs blast back to the turbulent midcentury moment when old Hollywood gave way to something new.

Jul 19, 2021 — When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously...

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Apr 10, 2020 — Songbook Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is the War and Peace of Taiwanese juvenile-delinquent movies. It is also part of a tradition of films that use the process of a character slowly learning a single song as a narrative-building...

Aug 6, 2019 — Once, in 1977, Werner Herzog read a news item about a volcano that was supposed to erupt in Guadeloupe and one man living there who refused to evacuate with the rest of the island’s population. Herzog being Herzog, he immediately...

Apr 13, 2012 — Performances Fists in the Pocket, a gasp-inducing, mouth-frothing, black-comic attack on bourgeois values, is remembered first and foremost as a shocking debut from director Marco Bellocchio. But it gave its star, Lou Castel, a memorable entrance of his own: he...

Jul 30, 2024 — Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng will be on hand for a fourteen-film American Cinematheque retrospective.

Apr 30, 2024 — The gentle rapport between actors Lili Taylor and River Phoenix fuels this humane examination of American masculinity, a film that showcases the nuanced and compassionate approach of director Nancy Savoca.

Feb 2, 2024 — The week brings the final issue of Cinema Scope, a revival of Not a Pretty Picture, and a series of films starring Jean Arthur.