In this ongoing column, one writer will send another a new piece of writing about a film they have been watching and pondering over, in the hopes that this will prompt a connection to a different film the other has been watching.

Coded Bias, Time, and A Thousand Cuts are films made by women of color about women of color who have had enough with the status quo and taken it upon themselves to demand justice on their own terms.

By Susannah Gruder | January 29, 2020
Festival Dispatch

While I tend to chafe at categorizing directors based on gender, each of these films is richer as a result of their lived experience as women, and the particular struggle of searching for agency in a world that limits it.

January 14, 2020
Years in Review

Biggest Offense, Best Car Chase, Most Unexpectedly Kubrickian, Biggest Missed Opportunity, Best Audience Experience, Most Offensive Archival Project, Best Long Takes, Most Jaundiced Take on Relationships, Best Reverse Shot, and much more

January 3, 2020
Years in Review

The Irishman, The Souvenir, Parasite, Atlantics, Uncut Gems, Transit, A Hidden Life, High Life, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

By Caden Mark Gardner | December 16, 2019
Todd Haynes

Dark Waters is at once a legal thriller, an environmental disaster movie, and a dramatized historical document of a region, spanning decades, from the atomic age to present. On its face, such a project, set primarily in corporate offices, might seem an unlikely fit for Todd Haynes.

By Michael Koresky | November 20, 2019
Todd Haynes

Superstar, by design, is not something you fondly recall; like Safe, it’s a film that uses a literal disease as cover for something less medically diagnosable—a social rot so deeply entrenched that there may be no cure.

Unfriended: Dark Web, Penda's Fen, The Collector, Someone's Watching Me, The Queen of Spades, Angst, Amazing Stories: "Go to the Head of the Class"

By Tayler Montague | October 26, 2019
Festival Dispatch

As a viewer and participant, I was increasingly aware that the objective of the festival was to be a space in which we questioned and looked closely at the historical work and power imbalances that have long existed within the documentary form.

By Lawrence Garcia | September 19, 2019
Festival Dispatch

Eloy Enciso’s Endless Night, Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever,Affonso Uchôa’s Seven Years in May, Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Krabi, 2562, James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s This Action Lies, Annie MacDonell’s Book of Hours, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, and more

By Sarah Fonseca | July 19, 2019
At the Museum

Hammer craved ancestral knowledge. There were the early conquests of those who surrounded her. In later films, there was the unrequited challenge of women who came before her; these efforts endure most potently.

By David Schwartz | April 10, 2019

Close to hour five, his mouth flutters and he breathes a bit spastically, like he is about to wake up. Coming after the preceding stillness, the moment hits like an explosion in an action movie. But the film will end without him actually waking.

By Matt Connolly | February 7, 2019
At the Museum

The tonal, visual, and thematic contrasts between these two masters of British filmmaking all seem to converge around their seemingly diametric views of mother England: a sober bulwark of civilization for Jennings; a largely hollowed-out husk for Jarman.

By Nick Pinkerton | January 19, 2019
At the Museum

Gagnon makes work that’s legitimately punk as fuck—bleak, scabrous, and resounding with a madman’s cackle.