“Cinema has something premonitory about it,” says Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), the cult director-turned-adman at the center of Bitter Christmas. It’s a statement director Pedro Almodóvar…
“Is there even a suspect? Is there even a crime?” These words spoken by Detective Mijares (Alchris Galura) are as good a summation as you’re…
In this dispatch: The Day She Returns…
Every time a Hong Sang-soo film plays at a film festival, one can assume someone in the audience is encountering the prolific filmmaker for the…
It is perhaps inevitable that a higher number of films are going to be focused on the difficulties of aging as birth rates decline and…
Shin Godzilla exists in a class of its own, nearly experimental in its focus on political red tape in the face of a developing catastrophe,…
You’d think it would be impossible to create a new vision of death and the afterlife after more than a century of cinematic depictions. A…
In this dispatch: A Long Winter…
Andrew Haigh has proven adept, at times exceptionally so, at crossing diverse conceptual landscapes. His relationship dramas, of both the young and queer (Weekend, Looking,…
Virginia Woolf’s seminal novel Mrs. Dalloway is a daunting candidate for cinematic representation, relying as it does on the detailed evocation of the inner lives…
In this dispatch: Life of Jorge Luis Borges…
For the past decade, James Gray has been talked about in cinephile circles as the last great American (neo-)classist, the only auteur effectively continuing to…
“My father said you got to swallow your feelings.” Jimmy Page, the fictional actor at the center of Ira Sachs’ new film The Man I…
In his rather humbly titled “Autobiographical Notes” that appeared in the New Yorker in 1970, Jorge Luis Borges recounts the day in 1935 when, from her deathbed, his paternal grandmother Frances Haslam — “a respectable English lady” from the West Midlands — told her “Georgie” and the gathered family: “‘I am only an old woman
Continue Reading
It’s a shame I had to see Kent Jones’ Willem Dafoe vehicle, Late Fame, on the Upper West Side at NYFF in mid-September. It was…
Sympathetic portrayals of kids who’ve fallen into a life of crime have been commonplace in the arthouse circuit since at least the days of Italian…
In 2017’s Summer 1993, director Carla Simón’s feature debut, a young girl is sent to live with her mother’s family in Barcelona after her mother’s…
“All films are time travel films, and all films are ghost films,” said filmmaker Mark Jenkin at a post-screening Q&A for the New York Film…
On November 1 and 2, 2001, then-28-year-old Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari visited Gaza, and left with about two hours and forty minutes worth of MiniDV…
At the beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length documentary, Our Land (originally titled Landmarks), we’re presented with satellite images of Earth. From this zoomed out…
Plenty of films have traversed the anxieties of separation and national identity, specifically the question of what happens when a nation breaks up from within,…