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Festivals: True/False
The biggest event in Missouri during the week of the True/False Film Fest in March was not the True/False Film Fest. The day before the first batch of screenings, the U.S. Department of Justice...
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Interview: Piotr Szulkin
One of the most enigmatic and unclassifiable living Polish filmmakers, Piotr Szulkin appears to have bid farewell to cinema, for good. The zenith of Szulkin’s career coincided with the escalation of...
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Deep Focus: Terminator Genisys
The producers of Alan Taylor’s ambitious, interminable Terminator Genisys have circulated James Cameron’s praise for the movie as an official seal of approval. In a promotional featurette, Cameron...
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Film of the Week: Amy
In a film fairly heaving with poignant, even bitterly painful images, one stands out in a singular way. It’s a shot of the late Amy Winehouse sitting on stage, seemingly in a world of her own, when...
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Cannes Interview: Miguel Gomes
It’s hard to think of another film, much less one addressing socioeconomic strife, that is quite like Miguel Gomes’s The Arabian Nights, comprising three separate volumes that embrace sprawl and...
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Cannes Interview: Alice Winocour
Having shown her debut feature Augustine in Critics’ Week in 2012, French filmmaker Alice Winocour returned to Cannes this year with Maryland, a paranoid chamber thriller that screened in Un Certain...
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NYAFF: 2 Tough Guys
Since its beginnings, the Japanese film industry, perhaps in a holdover from the world of kabuki theater, has heavily relied on the star system to make and promote its films. As in many other...
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The New Issue: July/August 2015
Noah Baumbach’s screwball update Mistress America is our July/August cover story—and fellow filmmaker Alex Ross Perry is on hand to do our in-depth interview about Baumbach's films, getting them made,...
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Bombast: You Say You Want a Revolution?
Everybody needs a hobby. In my own spare time, I have a habit of curating potential film retrospectives guaranteed to arouse little to no public interest—cinematographers-turned-directors, for...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Indonesian Exploitation
The Warrior Indonesian exploitation cinema is unmapped territory, but rising above it all like a mighty mountain of machismo is Jaka Sembung aka The Warrior (81). Directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra,...
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NYAFF Interview: Daihachi Yoshida
In the late Nineties and early Aughts, two genres of Japanese film rose to prominence within Western cult-movie circles, thanks in large part to the Internet and DVDs: J-horror (The Ring, Pulse, Dark...
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Interview: Sean Baker
On paper, Sean Baker’s fifth feature might sound like a parody of the contemporary American micro-budget indie: the day-in-the-life urban tale of two transgender sex workers—starring unknowns, shot...
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Deep Focus: Minions
In Minions, the prequel to the Despicable Me movies, evil Scarlett Overkill describes her mini-henchmen as “pill-shaped miracle workers.” Actually, they’re more like petite yellow projectiles. With...
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Review: Self/less
In spite of its implausible premise and Grand Canyon-sized plot holes, John Frankenheimer’s 1966 sci-fi horror classic Seconds is one of the most insightful American films ever made about the 1960s....
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Bombast: The Cincinnati Kid
Amalie R. Rothschild’s 1990 documentary Painting the Town: The Illusionistic Murals of Richard Haas contains a catalog of the trompe l’oeil works of Haas, a Wisconsin-born artist who made his name in...
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Film of the Week: Tangerine
American independent cinema thrives on its legends of risky feats pulled off on the cheap: its history can be written in tales of shopping trolleys used for tracking shots, of avant-gardists briefly...
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Art/Form: Antonioni at the Cinémathèque Française
Monica Vitti et Michelangelo Antonioni à la Biennale de Venise de 1962, DR. How do you hang a filmmaker? This question confronts any curator who mounts a gallery show about cinema. When works...
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Kaiju Shakedown: The Man Who Stole the Sun
The Man Who Stole the Sun is a bona fide classic of Seventies cinema. It was ranked as the seventh-greatest Japanese movie of all time by the influential film magazine Kinema Junpo, and appears...
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Rep Diary: Ford and Ireland
Rio Grande An eerily suspended, time-stopping moment from a filmmaker particularly skilled at them: the cavalry regiment under the command of one Lt. Colonel Kirby Yorke (John Wayne), having set up...
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Review: Trainwreck
In the second installment of his “Game Changers” series in FILM COMMENT, Paul Schrader concluded his history of the close-up with an anecdote illustrating how Hollywood is currently addressing...
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Deep Focus: Mr. Holmes
In the opening paragraph of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” Dr. John Watson explains that his friend Sherlock Holmes “has definitely retired from London and betaken himself...
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Film of the Week: Horse Money
Writing about Pedro Costa’s Horse Money in the current issue of Film Comment, Kent Jones argues that the Portuguese director’s films “have been more lauded than described.” There may be a reason for...
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The Mystery of the Great Pyramid
Turn your watch, turn your watch back about a hundred thousand years. I’ll meet you by the third pyramid Ah come on, that’s what I want —The B-52s There is a terrifying shot in Land of the Pharaohs....
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Festivals: Il Cinema Ritrovato
Les Vampires One of the reliable highlights of Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival is its slate of centennial programs. While the major American productions—The Birth of a Nation and The Cheat—were...
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Interview: Pedro Costa
Horse Money is the long-awaited new feature from Pedro Costa, who casts Ventura (Colossal Youth) again to play a version of himself, alongside Vitalina Varela. A portion of the film previously...
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Deep Focus: Southpaw
Jake Gyllenhaal is a gutsy, sophisticated performer, but his boxer hero in Southpaw fights like a crude Method actor. Named Billy Hope—presumably because he uses his fists like billy clubs and stands...
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Frank at 100: Sinatra on Screen
The Man With the Golden Arm recording session, 1955 When I was 17, it was a very good year—though I was probably closer to 14. Like any discerning middle-schooler in the late Nineties, I listened to...
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Bombast: Where Were You in ’82?
The Decline of Western Civilization Most of the subjects of The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 boots-and-braces-on-the-ground documentary on Southern California hardcore,...
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Film of the Week: The Look of Silence
The recent trial of 93-year-old former SS guard Oskar Gröning has reanimated long-running debates about justice, reconciliation, and the necessity or usefulness of prosecuting war criminals who have...
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Kaiju Shakedown: The Naked Movies
Naked Killer Suspense synthesizers squeal on the soundtrack as a woman in a poufy orange top, invisible miniskirt, and high-fashion hat clip-clops nervously down empty, blue-lit Hong Kong streets....
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