Film Comment

YOU’D BE FORGIVEN FOR DISPLAYING symptoms of whiplash after the past few months in the film world, much less the past year or several years. From distribution to production to exhibition to (let’s not forget) the films and filmmakers themselves, ther

SINCE MY TEENS, I’VE BEEN A KEEN READER AND CINEPHILE. I shared this with Harun Farocki, my teacher, friend, and collaborator. Transit is dedicated to Harun. He gave me Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel, upon which it’s based. Growing up in West Germany, I w

Ah, the winter months, when sleigh bells ring-a-ling their way past December and into the wastelands of January and February—or not, depending on where you live and what role/havoc climate change has played in your local weather system. ’Tis a time o

ONE OF THE MOST UNCOMPROMISING and versatile cinematographers working today, Bruno Delbonnel resumed his collaboration with the Coen Brothers with their six-part Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, shot over 10 weeks. What was your underl

Like her previous mordant and tantalizingly elliptical dissections of the bourgeoisie, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama tells a story of colonialism, this time through a Spanish functionary in a South American backwater who awaits a reprieve (return to the mot

EVERY YEAR THAT PASSES UNDER the Trump presidency builds upon its prior injuries to democracy and dignity through the slow creep of normalization: people get used to it, whether they hate it, love it, don’t care, or are too busy or beleaguered to car

IN NOVEMBER, FILMSTRUCK WAS STRUCK its fatal blow. For those unaware, the dearly departed U.S. streaming service, which launched in fall 2016, was a coproduction of Turner Classic Movies and Warner Bros. Digital Networks; in addition to its deep cata

Director: Christophe Honoré Country/Distributor: France, Strand Releasing Opening: February 15 A welcome complexity has crept into recent films recounting the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, rejecting the impulse to paint the era’s gay men as eith

Director: Lukas Dhont Country/Distributor: Belgium/Netherlands, Netflix Opening: January 18 At first, Lukas Dhont’s Girl promises a creative intervention within the fastexpanding array of trans-themed cinema. The plot concerns the determination of te

Director: Steven Soderbergh Country/Distributor: USA, Netflix Opening: February 8 WITH HIGH FLYING BIRD, STEVEN Soderbergh discovers yet another profession whose practitioners’ for-hire physiques stand in for the gig-to-gig economics of his own creat

Director: Asghar Farhadi Country/Distributor: Spain/France/Italy, Focus Features Opening: February 8 Asghar Farhadi is unsurpassed in his surgical examination of the ways in which unexpected developments can bring history to the fore, and up to now h

Director: Jonas Åkerlund Country/Distributor: UK/Sweden, Gunpowder & Sky Opening: February 8 The work of Jonas Åkerlund has been seen as outrageous from the get-go, with the notoriety of his early music videos for The Prodigy and others. In Lords of

Director: Meredith Danluck Country/Distributor: USA, The Orchard Opening: January 4 In this debut narrative feature from director Meredith Danluck, Katherine (Katherine Waterston) is an American photographer in Brussels whose marriage to a Belgian mo

Library Streaming Services Kanopy & Hoopla Digital THE SINGLE BEST STREAMING SITE REMAINS the one you can access for free with your library card. An Australian-founded company originally serving the university market, Kanopy first developed its strea

By Salka Viertel NYRB Classics, $17.95 For decades now, Salka Viertel’s long-out-of-print The Kindness of Strangers has survived through secondhand booksellers and word of mouth. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in what is now part of Ukraine, Viertel

THIS MAGAZINE IS FULL OF 2018 LISTS, SO I THOUGHT I’D GO back in time and consider the posters of 1918. The abiding impression one gets from looking at the movie posters of 100 years ago is of color. Stone lithography printing, which until the early