As with the latest films by Manoel de Oliveira and — prior to his recent passing — Raul Ruiz, it’s tempting to digest a new film by the 91-year-old…
As the world’s sole “industry only” film festival, Cannes stands alone in that the first audiences to see each film are not a mix of…
If we’re talking about a “golden age of documentaries,” as many seem to be doing these days, then we really should be talking more about…
On Wednesday night, New York’s Film Forum unveiled a gorgeous digital restoration (courtesy Janus Films) of Roberto Rossellini’s masterful relationship drama Voyage to Italy. The film…
Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason at first seems like a standard talking-heads documentary writ large, at least if one were to offer up a brief…
In Keisuke Kinoshita’s audaciously experimental The Ballad of Narayama, artifice becomes a vessel of truth, turning theatrical illusion into something boldly cinematic. Inspired by traditional Japanese Kabuki…
Today marks the return of Walter Hill to the big screen—with the Sylvester Stallone-starring Bullet to the Head, the director’s first theatrically released film since 2002’s Undisputed. His…
All one need do is look at the many and varied riches cinema had to offer in 2012 to disprove the crowing — yes, once…
To engage with something critically is to assume, despite any post-structural handwringing, that the works with which we’re engaged contain some essential truth. That’s the conceit…
You’re not allowed to know the Iranian Woman. Not truly, anyway—not personally, and don’t even think about intimately. Not in public. In public, you must treat her…
There’s at least a few reasons for the near total lack of critical interest in Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten, not the least of which…
Even in his earlier, more relatively conventional films, Abbas Kiarostami always maintained an eye for radical formal experimentation. Close Up, for instance, is as much…
In an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Abbas Kiarostami recited a verse from the poet Rumi: “You are my polo ball, running before…
In 2001, at the request of the United Nations, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Africa to scout locations and shoot raw footage for a film focussing…
In retrospect, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us represents the calm before a contentious political decade between Iran and the U.S., one that dragged filmmakers…
Part of the appeal of a film like Taste of Cherry—Kiarostami’s minimalist masterpiece, all white-canvas stretches of silence and inaction—lies in its openness to interpretation,…
Abbas Kiarostami has mostly stayed away from love stories—he tends to find it impossible in his films to recreate situations that even remotely hint at…
When Abbas Kiarostami made Where Is the Friend’s Home?, he had no intention of making a trilogy. But his next two films, Life, and Nothing…
The Iranian cinema is abundant with films about children (The White Balloon and Children of Heaven being the two classic popular examples). Where Is the Friend’s…
Whether a film does or does not present the truth seems considerably less important to us than whether or not it intends to do so. That…