Bedsaul, Ryan. "I Recognize That Assassin." Los Angeles Review of Books (July 12, 2025) ["
Ryan Bedsaul writes on The Phoenician Scheme and Wes Anderson’s late style."]
Hudson, David. "Up Three Mountains with Robert Redford." Current (September 18, 2025) ["In a 2017 Esquire profile, Robert Redford told Michael Hainey that “to climb up the mountain is the fun, not standing at the top. There’s nowhere to go. But climbing up, that struggle, that to me is where the fun is.” Having appeared in his thirties in a string of hits—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973)—Redford was as big as any movie star gets. Mountain topped.
He turned to directing and won the Oscar for Best Director right out of the gate. Ordinary People (1980) won three more Oscars as well, including Best Picture. And another climb was already underway. In 1978, he cofounded the Utah/US Film Festival and launched the Sundance Institute the following year. With the Sundance Film Festival (officially renamed in 1991), Redford “played the role of mentor, patron, champion of the small and scrappy, benevolent godfather of independent cinema,” writes Adrian Horton in the Guardian. “It’s through Sundance, rather than his films, that Redford became, as the Black List founder Franklin Leonard put it on X, ‘arguably the film industry’s most consequential American over the last fifty years.’”"]
Peppiat, Rich. "Kneecap — Rich Peppiatt on politics and partying." MUBI Podcast (July 24, 2025) ["Our full interview with the writer/director of the Northern Irish indie phenomenon KNEECAP. Host Rico Gagliano visits Rich at his Belfast pad, to talk about wrangling the movie's titular hard-partying provocateurs, the rise of Northern Ireland's film industry, and why he briefly resented a Quiet Girl."]
Reichardt, Kelly, et al. "On The Mastermind." Film at Lincoln Center #610 (September 29, 2025) ["We were delighted to welcome Kelly Reichardt, Bill Camp, Hope Davis, Gaby Hoffman, and John Magaro to the 63rd New York Film Festival to discuss The Mastermind in a conversation with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Reichardt’s restrained and often funny anti-thriller is set against a Nixon-era backdrop of alienation and disillusionment, following a taciturn family man (Josh O’Connor) who makes the rash, largely inscrutable decision to orchestrate a heist at the local art museum."]
Reijn, Halina. "Smashing in the doors of Amsterdam cinema." MUBI Podcast (July 10, 2025) ["The Netherlands isn't known for tons of great movies... but its capital city of Amsterdam is packed with tons of great movie theaters. Rico takes us on a tour of his favorite town, to learn why. (Spoiler alert: Breaking into buildings played a role). Guests include director/actor Halina Reijn (BABYGIRL, BLACK BOOK), NY Times contributor Nina Siegal, and more."]
Victor, Eva. "Sorry, Baby." IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit (July 1, 2025) ["The writer, director, and star of the Sundance hit and new A24 release joins IndieWire's Chris O'Falt to break down their directorial debut. Eva was forthright about the challenges of learning how to direct (including a graduate level film class of sorts supervised by Barry Jenkins) and also explored how she balanced a gentle tonal approach to a tough subject."]
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"A film like “The Sugarland Express” is proof that some legends are just built different. Directing his first theatrically released film at 28 years old, Steven Spielberg practically emerged from the womb with all of the characteristics that would make him the biggest Hollywood director of the next half century: the effortless command of spectacle that always knows when to take a backseat to storytelling, the buttery smooth camera movements that seamlessly shift focus without ever letting viewers know it’s happening, and his unapologetic sincerity and deep belief in the dreams of brighter days that Hollywood has always sold us.
Many a modern viewer has watched “The Sugarland Express” expecting a trail of breadcrumbs that point to the development of a more mature Spielberg who directed his best films, but its pleasures are more immediate than that — “The Sugarland Express” is one of his best films, full stop. In Goldie Hawn’s Lou Jean, a young mom who will stop at nothing to get her baby out of the foster system, Spielberg found one of his most endearing protagonists. Her endless love, refusal to accept defeat, and good humor about the ridiculousness of riding in a cop convoy while holding an officer at gunpoint makes the character impossible to root against, and Spielberg is often happy to sit back and let Hawn’s charisma do all the hard work for him.
“The Sugarland Express” is Spielberg at his funniest and most sincere, complete with stellar car chase sequences that foreshadow his blockbuster dominance, and beautiful shots of characters watching “Looney Tunes” that may well have laid the foundation for Sammy Fabelman’s eventual trips to the movies. Its legacy has been overshadowed by the colossal movies its director has made in the subsequent decades, but the film would be just as deserving of a spot on this list if Spielberg had never stepped behind the camera again." —CZ
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"Talking with Scott Tobias at the Reveal, Kittredge, an editor and one of the producers of the 2022 Shudder series Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror, argues that The Heretic belongs in the company of two other films from 1977 that were once shunned and have since come in for more positive reevaluation: Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York and Friedkin’s own Sorcerer. Friedkin’s The Exorcist is “basically a conservative treatise about how secularism is never the answer,” says Kittredge. “The Heretic is an extremely progressive, extremely feminist film. And I think that was also one of the reasons it was so completely rejected in 1977.”
“Attempts to reclaim once-vilified movies as misunderstood masterpieces can seem like special pleading,” writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Guardian. “Even so, Kittredge makes a strong case for admitting The Heretic into the canon. There is astonishing Steadicam work from Garrett Brown (later to work on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining); Ennio Morricone’s mesmerizing score; Richard Macdonald’s stylized production design; buzzy mind-bending shots from a locust-eye point of view; a rip-roaring race back to Georgetown to confront the evil one; and, above all, the sheer, crazy ambition of Boorman’s storytelling.”" - David Hudson
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