Features
Pia Hellenthal did not want Searching Eva to be slotted into one type of film, in the same way its subject seeks not to be pigeonholed into one identity.
Two writers connect over wildly disparate movies that nevertheless give each of them that wisful parental pull. Read about the mothers and fathers of Locke and Imitation of Life.
Doc Films did not just allow us to access film history; it allowed us to express, in however humble a fashion, our own place within it and within contemporary film culture, one that only lives as a social endeavor carried out and fulfilled in a collective space.
A roiling existential angst unites a high-concept comedy by Albert Brooks and a classic melodrama by Nicholas Ray.
For Eborn, the focus of Transnistra is more personal than political. “My work begins next to the character,” she said. “There’s a world around them that’s potent, it’s alive somehow. The inspiration comes from this person.”
Two strange musicals from the 1970s—featuring Catherine Deneuve and Donna Summer—help our writers find pleasure in the perverse.
It’s where you go to watch a movie, and it's where everyone around is likely also watching you, lest you think that being black and alone in a public space has finally become unremarkable.
"To try to approach this question I shouldn’t necessarily be looking only at the media or the makers of it, but rather at the eyes that see that media."
The need for the geometric sublimity of music leads two critics to two very different musical movie experiences.
The Brattle, the Castro, and NYC’s great repertory screens, including its crown jewels, Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade and the Sumner Redstone Theater at Museum of the Moving Image. Right now, they’re just empty rooms, but they are also the settings for some of my life’s most profound, moving, and transformative artistic experiences.
With hand sanitizer presence at venues and travelers carrying packs of alcohol wipes, we were aware that life was in the process of reconfiguring itself, but it didn’t quite seem real yet.
It is not interested in the hospital as a site of sickness. Tortum’s documentary is concerned with workers—the human element that can transform the moribund into a “festive” feeling—following the daily doings of surgeons, nurses, janitors, dieners, students, and professors.
The chaos of the moment feels aptly reflected and deeply felt in both a Bogdanovich slapstick classic from the seventies and a Hammer horrror gem from the sixties.
This column will not simply be about great films we saw in theaters, but about films on which are imprinted the mental traces of the past, of the ineffable experiences of seeing them at a certain point in our personal histories.