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Film of the Week: Foxcatcher
A story can feel entirely different depending on whether you know the ending in advance; that’s implicit in the nature of tragedy, which addresses your awareness of watching the inexorable workings of...
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Intense Vocalization: Marguerite Duras
Hiroshima Mon Amour The Marguerite Duras retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this month—18 years after the celebrated auteur’s death—presents an ideal opportunity to contemplate her...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Kim Ki-young
They called him Mr. Monster. From 1955 to 1990, Kim Ki-young was the lunatic in the attic of Korean cinema, a former newsreel propagandist who went on to write, direct, edit, and art direct deranged...
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Bombast: Fan Club
Pulp Fiction If Pulp Fiction, released twenty years ago this week, was the film cultural equivalent to Nirvana’s Nevermind in pop music—and I’ve argued this point more than once—then Quentin Tarantino...
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Notebook: From What is Before
Lav Diaz's latest movie, From What is Before, premiered in August at the Locarno Film Festival. His 2001 film Batang West Side screens October 19 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series...
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Film of the Week: Force Majeure
The killer shot in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (aka Turist in Sweden) arrives 10 minutes into the film, lasts some four and a half minutes, and will leave you gasping, especially if you had no idea...
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Interview: Ruben Östlund
With sparing (but incisive) dialogue, long takes, and majestic wide shots, Force Majeure depicts the crisis of faith surrounding a Swedish father, Tomas, who runs away from a life-or-death situation...
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Film of the Week: Nightcrawler
Given that Nightcrawler is all about TV journalism, its content hardly screams “Breaking News.” The film reveals that freelance TV news-gathering is a nasty, amoral business, and that TV...
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Festivals: Camden International Film Festival
Located midway between the cities of Portland to the south and Bangor to the north, Camden is a snug little harbor town in Maine set off against the mountains which cradle it against the sea, the...
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Interview: Laura Poitras
Laura Poitras’s Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR premiered at the New York Film Festival to extraordinary applause, reflecting not only the grip its subject matter exerts on the public but also...
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NYFF: Critics Academy Entries
The below articles were produced as part of the 2014 New York Film Festival Critics Academy, whose participants were invited to contribute writing about the selection. The Secret Sharer: Seymour: An...
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Bombast: 35, Stayin’ Alive
Avatar Digital projection came as a blitzkrieg, and carried the day before most of us knew what was happening. “Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly?” Roger Ebert wrote in November, 2011,...
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Rep Diary: Winsor McCay
This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most influential films ever made. Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur was the first animated cartoon created by the self-described “originator and...
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Kaiju Shakedown: 31 Asian Horror Movies
Talk about Asian horror and people usually think about J-horror’s dead wet girls with long black hair and bad attitudes, but scary movies have been flickering across Asia’s silver screens for decades....
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Film of the Week: Goodbye to Language
Watching Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work can be a source of joy, but also of terror—especially if you’re trying to write about it. Your eyes are bombarded with violent, abrupt changes of texture, color,...
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Pam Grossman is an independent curator, writer, and teacher of magical practice and history. She is the creator of Phantasmaphile, a blog which specializes in art and culture with a mystical bent,...
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Bombast: Horror Business
The Quatermass Experiment Halloween, which traces its roots back to the Gaelic festival of Samhain, is preceded by the one week in the year when all natural order is inverted, and decent, upright film...
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Interview: Sergei Loznitsa
Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan had its world premiere last May in a special screening at Cannes, where it could be easily missed amidst the usual ballyhoo surrounding the main Competition. Yet Loznitsa’s...
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Festivals: Locarno’s Titanus Retrospective
Tormento In 1904 a 19-year-old law school dropout named Gustavo Lombardo founded a film company in Naples. Lombardo began by distributing films by Gaumont, Éclair, Vitagraph, and other foreign...
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Film of the Week: Interstellar
In an interview in The Guardian this week, Christopher Nolan mused: “What I’ve found is, people who let my films wash over them—who don’t treat it like a crossword puzzle, or like there is a test...
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