In what will likely be my last column in these pages, I’ve mainly tried to highlight releases and films that I’ve been meaning yet failing to watch for ages, following the assumption that it’s now or never. As most of my examples make clear, this avo

The aesthetic appeal of Sofia Coppola’s work—baby pink and pastel colours, girly make-up and cute clothes, soft lighting and trippy music—belies a deeper understanding of the condition of teenage girls, her favourite subject. For the filmmaker, these

It requires relatively little mental strain to imagine a world in which all that can be photographed has been; it requires, I think, considerably more to imagine one in which every possible photograph has been made. I find that both of these little t

Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world o

The latest film by Martin Rejtman reaffirms his singular place in Argentine and world cinema as one of the rare non-mainstream auteurs working today, with brio and invention, in the realm of comedy. Beginning with Rapado (1992), each of Rejtman’s fic

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s sublime eco-fable, Evil Does Not Exist, begins and ends with the plangent score by Ishibashi Eiko, played fortissimo over an extended tracking shot facing skywards. A forest canopy, stark and stripped of its foliage by winter’s sp

This essay is a chapter from my forthcoming book, which I have called “a continuation by other means of my 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, a book about how movies have represented and misrepresented the city of Los Angeles.” It was written

Lately it feels like everywhere I look obscure old films are being dusted off and presented to eager publics. Even a right-wing newspaper like London’s Telegraph had cause last November to speak of a “repertory boom” in the city where I live, deeming

“The problem is that it then goes off on tangents and the plot becomes secondary.”—A Mysterious World Until recently a somewhat forgotten figure of the New Argentine Cinema, director Rodrigo Moreno has, with The Delinquents, asserted himself as perha

With her 1818 novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley not only authored a story that passed into myth, but also invented a new type of monster that exists independent of that story. It is the Monster—and a familiar but shifting se

In her 2023 book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell writes that “at its most useful…leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it.” The passage is evocative not only for the way in

At a recent NYFF talk on the trustworthiness of the documentary image, Frederick Wiseman quipped that back in 1968, having immersed himself in a prison for the criminally insane for his first film, Titicut Follies (1967), the logical milieu for a fol

A teenaged girl is texting her boyfriend from her bedroom, seeking compassion: “I’m just in a really bad place right now.” The boy responds: “Oh, what are you doing in Germany?” Many can relate to this fierce meme which appeared on social media follo

Despite what you may have heard from some breathless movie critics, 2023 was a year of further decline for American cinema. But there was a promising inflection point: the year marked a moment when the seemingly unstoppable empire of Marvel began its

Clocking in at a clean 47 seconds, the title sequence in The Killer sets something like a metronome for David Fincher’s latest effort. Guided by the steady pulse of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, a montage unfolds on details of the eponymous,

“There is a metaphor recurrent in contemporary discourse on the nature of consciousness: that of cinema. And there are cinematic works which present themselves as analogues of consciousness in its constitutive and reflexive modes, as though inquiry i

Don Siegel’s superior crime picture Charley Varrick (1973) was supposed to be called Last of the Independents, but that title was nixed by Universal honcho Lew Wasserman. This probably gives even more credence to the subversive, stick-it-to-the-syste

Two movies, both alike in indignity, in the ’90s, where we lay our scene. Because neither Videoheaven nor Pavements—both putatively non-fictional pop-culture essay films written and directed by Alex Ross Perry—have officially been released, programme

In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that mechanized war, industrialization, and urbanization were reorganizing human existence on a mass scale and were, in turn, making “experience” increasingly incommunicable. The storyteller, one

A few years ago, I interviewed the artmaking team of Dani and Sheilah ReStack, a married couple with children who described their work as based on the concept of “feral domesticity.” It’s a conceptual oxymoron, since the two words suggest opposite se

“Nothing more Satanic or artistic has been seen on the German stage,” wrote one critic of the premiere of Salome in Ganz, Austria in 1891. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross describes the unveiling of Richard Strauss’ opera—which climaxed, like Oscar Wi

“…is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’ This conjunc

Is Wim Wenders back? If he is, I’m not sure it’s such a good thing. Perfect Days, the tenth film by the German director to compete at Cannes, is a working-class yarn about the pleasantly banal routines of a toilet cleaner named Hirayama (Yakusho Koji

A boy in a blue track jacket and Victorian collar sits on a stepladder, surrounded by production equipment. While a stage tech drags a snowy backdrop behind him, the actor reads from the book in his lap. It is Orlando by Virginia Woolf—the knotty, da

Where for many filmmakers the pandemic discouraged production or curbed creativity, it only seems to have inspired Radu Jude. Always impossible to peg, the prolific 46-year-old Romanian director has grown especially wily and provocative in recent yea

It has now been four decades since Gilles Deleuze published his major two-volume treatise on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In France, where the books were reportedly something of a publishing sensation, commentators