Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 science-fiction drama and pastiche, “Alphaville” (which I discuss in this clip) is, among other things, an exemplary use of genre conventions and cinephilic r...
David Chute, at Hungry Ghost, rightly wonders why, of all the shows on television, “Girls” is the only one I watch regularly. The reason is simple: because of Lena Dunham, its creator and...
“Moonrise Kingdom” isn’t the only movie opening today that’s set in the sixties. “Men in Black 3” is a time-travel action film, in which a comically horrific outer...
I’ve never concealed my admiration—indeed, my love—for Wes Anderson’s films and in my Profile of Anderson, which appeared in the magazine, in 2009, I looked at the experiences...
Elsa Keslassy reports in Variety that Claude Lanzmann’s new film has a title—“Last of the Unjust”—and a lead producer, the new French company Synecdoche. The film, as I ...
Over at Page-Turner, I’ve posted about Susan Sontag’s film criticism and the entries in her recently published journals that illuminate it. One of these items is a fragment of a list, whi...
The life of Erich von Stroheim seems to have been ready-made for film noir. Anthony Mann’s superbly hectic yet downbeat noir “The Great Flamarion,” from 1945 (which I discuss in thi...
The American independent cinema is flourishing as never before, and its achievements are, both in the realm of individual works and as a sort of loosely but unmistakably collective set of endeavors, ...
Last night’s episode of “Girls” says lots of interesting things about Lena Dunham’s Hannah, and about life itself. It finds her returning to Lansing, Michigan, to join her par...
Yesterday, I cited an insightful comment from Jason Ross about the director as an actor, and “how many of the greatest films are films by singular artists who fully immerse their lives into the...
Dear readers, I’m grateful for your responses to the all-time top-ten list I posted here earlier this week. Lists are just a game—but even games have meaning. Imagine if, in “The Se...
I’m grateful to Edmund Yeo, the Malaysian filmmaker and blogger, for sending along, via Twitter, a link to the trailer to Ying Liang’s new film, “When Night Falls.” That’...
In his first American film, “Sunrise,” from 1927 (which I discuss in this clip), the German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau creates some of the greatest images in the history of the cin...
In response to a request from Nick James, the editor of the great British film journal Sight & Sound, to submit a ballot for their poll regarding the “Ten Greatest Films of All Time,” whi...
It’s great news that Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret” will be coming to DVD (and Blu-ray) on July 10th (at first available solely from Amazon), and that, in addition to the two-a...
Last night’s episode of “Girls” was, instantly noticeably, not directed by Lena Dunham; the result was, for the most part, a mere delivery system for Dunham’s screenplay. The ...
Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, “Grand Illusion,” (a new restoration of which settles in today at Film Forum for a two-week run; the film is also readily available on DVD), is one of the v...
Cinephiles and revival-house exhibitors must confront the increasing difficulty of obtaining 35-mm. prints of classic Hollywood movies. (Gendy Alimurung recently wrote about this in the L.A. Weekly.)...
A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about the effects of government subsidy on the French film industry. Over at Die Zeit, I found a recent article by the German filmmaker Dominik Graf called...
In his 2007 film, “Margot at the Wedding” (which I discuss in this clip), Noah Baumbach captures the shift in family dynamics that occurs when an outsider—a new spouse—joins i...
The last time a Socialist took over as President of France, in 1981, vast changes resulted for the French film industry. That incoming leader was François Mitterrand, and he brought in a Ministe...
Already in the second episode of “Girls,” the aspiring writer Hannah’s longtime friend Jessa (played by Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham’s real-life friend since high school) senses ...
Having just come back from a few invigorating, even exhilarating days of discussion and moviegoing at the Maryland Film Festival—which is one of the country’s leading showcases for the wo...
“The Avengers” is a movie that, in its calculated overload of sensation and symbol, exists in a realm beyond good and bad. The movie’s laughably literal and mechanistic exposition (...
From the very first shot and the very first voices of the fourth episode of “Girls,” something goes very wrong—and, for the rest of the episode, it keeps going that way. The voices,...
This week, in the magazine, I’ve written a Critic’s Notebook about the welcome restoration and reissue of Shirley Clarke’s first feature film, “The Connection,” from 196...
“Giants and Toys,” the 1958 film that I discuss in this clip, was directed by Yasuzo Masumura, a director of distinctive and idiosyncratic talent. He was a filmmaker of bitter conflict, a...
It’s a morning for passing along some water-cooler wisdom. A colleague who’s less enthusiastic about “The Five-Year Engagement” than I am wonders why it matters at all whether...
The Cindy Sherman show at MOMA, up through June 11th, folds in on itself with an utterly ingenious and heartbreaking twist that caught me by surprise. I had thought, from seeing her photographs piece...
Jason Segel has the wary, searching look in his eyes of a person who has known humiliation; the nervous, wide-eyed gaze seems to worry, “what’s next?” Though he’s tall and mus...
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