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Deep Focus: Hot Pursuit
Why Reese Witherspoon would choose to play an obsessive, hyper-focused cop in Anne Fletcher’s action comedy Hot Pursuit is even more puzzling than why she would decide to produce the movie. The role...
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Film of the Week: Reality
In Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, Jason (Alain Chabat), a struggling French director in L.A., pitches an idea for a science-fiction movie named Waves (“Like ‘microwaves’,” he explains). In it, TV sets...
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In Memoriam: Richard Corliss
We met in the late ’60s. I was at French Film Office, Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice, Mary soon-to-be-Corliss at MoMA and Richard, at, I think, New Times—the four of us on the brink of...
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The New Issue: May/June 2015
Looking and listening: the late, great filmmaker Albert Maysles (1926-2015) is the subject of our May/June 2015 cover story. Chris Boeckmann pays tribute to the documentarian’s attuned filmmaking with...
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Notebook: Karl Ove Knausgaard on The Idiots
The Idiots Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle lays bare every facet of the writer’s life, from his favorite bands to the humiliating details of his sexual failures. Perhaps the only thing we aren’t...
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Interview: Agnès Varda
Since her 1955 debut feature La Pointe Courte, the work of Agnès Varda has managed to reflect the interior and exterior worlds of her and her subjects in playful, insightful ways, regardless of genre...
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Interview: Martín Rejtman
Like many artists who straddle different mediums, Argentine filmmaker and novelist Martín Rejtman has alternated his focus over the course over his 28-year career, which in part explains the...
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Film of the Week: Slow West
John Maclean’s Slow West ends with a visual death toll—a series of shots in which the film tracks back, in reverse order, through all the characters who have been killed in the course of its brutal...
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Isaach de Bankolé: The Quiet Man Speaks
This year’s New York African Film Festival screened Philippe Lacôte’s Run, which premiered last year at Cannes in Un Certain Regard and features Isaach de Bankolé as a dissident who assists the title...
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Deep Focus: Mad Max: Fury Road
Over half of Mad Max: Fury Road unfolds in action-spectacle nirvana. Movement, images, and some plucky actors carry all the emotion and humor a movie of this scale needs, and its kinetic force...
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Cannes Dispatch #1: Tale of Tales
At the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival, Eugene Hernandez will be filing dispatches for FILM COMMENT about the films, press conferences, and other events. Tale of Tales Seated at the head of a wide...
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Bombast: Truck Yeah
Mad Max: Fury Road “Mad” Max Rockatansky is best known for his souped-up black 1974 Ford Falcon XB coupe, totaled early on in Mad Max: Fury Road, but we know for a fact that he has his Class A CDLs,...
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The Wonderful World of Welles: No Nuke Orson
Orson Welles as a student at The Todd School, circa 1930 Among the many misconceptions about Orson Welles—e.g., that none of his films made money, that all his protégés betrayed him—one that has...
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Cannes Dispatch #2: Son of Saul and Carol
Claude Lanzmann (left), Thierry Frémaux (center), and László Nemes (right) Of the 19 films chosen to debut in the prestigious competition section at Cannes, two of the films that have screened in the...
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Wonderful World of Welles: Welles in Woodstock
For once, an interviewer had stumped Orson Welles. In a hotel room in 1960, a seemingly innocuous question from a television reporter about a sense of home has him searching his pockets for a...
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Rep Diary: Valentine’s Day Massacre
We Won't Grow Old Together By some accounts, Saint Valentine was an early Christian priest who, after offending Emperor Claudius II, was beaten, stoned, and then beheaded. Many people feel something...
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Deep Focus: Tomorrowland
Steampunk and retrofuturism—genres that look forward by looking backward (and vice-versa), or what The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction defines as science fiction that captures “the older but still...
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Cannes Dispatch #3: The Lobster
During a press conference at Cannes this week, Yorgos Lanthimos proclaimed his love for the sitcom Friends. In the show’s second season, the character Phoebe refers to someone finding their “lobster,”...
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Film of the Week: Arabian Nights
Never mind being naïve enough to imagine ever seeing a film that will change the world, but even the most hardened critics, in their heart of hearts, come to Cannes with the dream at the back of their...
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Cannes Roundtable #1
Participants: Scott Foundas, chief film critic, Variety Todd McCarthy, chief film critic, The Hollywood Reporter Marco Grosoli, www.spietati.it Joan Dupont, International Herald Tribune Stefan...
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