Bite Back: The 2013 Readers’ Poll
Now it’s your turn to have a say. Did you think that Inside Llewyn Davis was just another soundtrack passed off as a movie by the Coen Brothers? Were you disturbed by the drugged-out sexploits of...
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Interview: Pawel Pawlikowski
During Poland’s many years under different occupying powers, Polish mothers came to serve as the preservers of Polish culture, carrying on traditions, history, and the native language at home. The...
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Film of the Week: Gloria
Just under a year ago, the Chilean feature Gloria became what you’d have to call the feel-good hit of an otherwise glum Berlinale competition. Any film that ends with its heroine on the dance floor,...
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Sundance 2014: Diary #2
Rudderless William H. Macy’s feature-length directorial debut, Rudderless, follows Sam, an ad exec (Billy Crudup) struggling to turn his life around after his teenage son dies in a school shooting....
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Review: Papirosen
Any filmmaker undertaking a family portrait has to strike the right balance between conveying a very personal experience and fashioning a more broadly engaging narrative. In Papirosen, Gastón Solnicki...
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Review: Charlie Victor Romeo
Unlike reality-TV mainstays like Seconds From Disaster or Air Crash Confidential, Charlie Victor Romeo functions without dramatic music, CGI simulations, voiceovers, or testimony from aviation...
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Sundance 2014: Diary #3
Infinitely Polar Bear Set in 1978, Maya Forbes’s Infinitely Polar Bear stars Mark Ruffalo as Cameron, a father of two young girls who has a nervous breakdown and struggles with bipolar disorder. The...
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Film of the Week: The Last of the Unjust
Embarking on his mammoth investigative documentary Shoah in 1975, Claude Lanzmann began by spending a week in Rome, interviewing an Austrian Jew named Benjamin Murmelstein. These interviews never...
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Review: Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
Having produced seven features and two shorts in a mere eight years, Quebecois filmmaker and former film critic Denis Côté has rapidly established himself as a fickle auteur whose signature is...
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Festivals: Vienna
Thanks to the cultural hoarding of the Hapsburgs, a visit to Vienna’s delightful Kunsthistorisches Museum epitomizes the term “embarrassment of riches.” The institution was a rewarding stop during a...
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Rep Diary: Scorsese’s Masterpieces of Polish Cinema
“Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” runs Feb. 5-16 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In 1946, twenty-year-old Andrzej Wajda enrolled as a painting student in the Kraków...
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Interview: Godfrey Reggio
In the arts, developments and accomplishments that come to seem outmoded, things of the past, have a way of reasserting themselves back into artistic practice, often without being recognized as...
View ArticleIn Memoriam: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Without presuming to know or explicate the “reasons” for the off-and-on hard drug use that eventually killed Philip Seymour Hoffman at age 46, it’s safe armchair-psychoanalyzing to say that he...
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Interview: Arnaud Desplechin
Last fall at the New York Film Festival, the filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin talked with FILM COMMENT about his latest work, Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which opens next Friday. Benicio Del...
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Festivals: Berlin Blog #1
Through films such as Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer, and, especially, Paul Greengrass’s Golden Bear winner Bloody Sunday, the conflict in Northern Ireland has...
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Festivals: Rotterdam
An integral part of Rotterdam’s mission has always been to bring attention to films that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, but the sheer size of the past few years’ programs makes such a task...
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Festivals: Berlin Blog #2
Stations of the Cross Two-thirds of the films competing for the Golden Bear have screened and the critical favorite thus far is Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross. The Stations of the Cross...
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Films of the Week: Two from Berlin
Severity at festivals is one thing, but if that’s what you’re really after, you hope for something a little sterner than the mere dourness that dominated the Berlinale this year. There were, as...
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Futures and Pasts: Trans-Europ-Express
Film criticism online, like any sort of cultural discourse online, has been swept up by the demands of a perpetual present. The dominant business model mandates that controversies—the more individual...
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Film of the Week: Jimmy P.
“Don’t be exuberant!” a doctor cautions Mathieu Amalric’s character in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian—futilely, of course, as Amalric carries on giving, to put it mildly, one of the most...
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