---. "Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind." Current (September 23, 2025) ["Talking to the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough back in May, Kelly Reichardt recalled the moment that she realized that The Mastermind—the first screenplay she’s written neither with a collaborator nor drawing on someone else’s story—“no longer has a structure to follow after the first quarter. From a heist movie, it kind of organically turns into another genre. For a while, I thought, ‘What have I done to myself?’ But I liked how it turned.”Critics do too. Seventeen of the best of them at Cannes, where The Mastermind premiered, rated every film they saw throughout the festival. All five of the top-ranked films on the Moirée grid will be screening at this year’s New York Film Festival, which opens on Friday. And the clear favorite is The Mastermind."]
Koski, Genevieve, et al. "'Til You Drop, Pt. 1 — They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" They Shoot Horses Don't They #492 (September 23, 2025) ["It took decades for THE LONG WALK to make it to the big screen, in part because the Stephen King novel on which it’s based is so unrelentingly grim — but as we discovered this week, it may actually be less so than the other half of this pairing, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY. Set during the Great Depression and featuring a protagonist who is greatly depressed, Sydney Pollack’s 1969 drama about a marathon dance contest has little room for uplift, but it’s nonetheless full of interesting characters and performances, evocative filmmaking choices, and one of cinema’s all-time downer endings."]
Rider, Benjamin. "Great Directors: Sembène, Ousmane." Sense of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["Ousmane Sembène is primarily remembered for his milestone contribution to African film history. His early films represent a linguistic and cultural shift from telling the stories of Africans in colonial countries by colonial filmmakers or filmmakers who were descendants of colonials in their colonial languages to telling homegrown stories by Indigenous African filmmakers in Indigenous African languages. As the first to step behind the camera and achieve this shift in the history of African cinema, Sembène became known as the literal “father of African film”. Nonetheless, his cinema deserves appreciation from other perspectives. He is more than just ‘the father of African film’ and should be acknowledged as a great filmmaker in his own right. After all, his contribution to film history is greater than just a linguistic and cultural shift in the region’s represented cinematic language and imagery. Sembène’s work mostly stands out for its extreme elements compared to his cinematic peers. His films often explore radical global humanist experiences, earning him a place in the film history canon as a filmmaker committed to depicting various forms of liberation. As such, he is widely regarded as a ‘revolutionary cinema’ filmmaker, one whose films are political and directly influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology, though at the same time, they are not to be considered part of “social realism”, nor films which he wanted to be considered the work of a filmmaker concerned with generating a “cinema of signs”. In this instance, interpretation is perhaps best for the audience to determine where his films truly align."]
--------------------------------------------------------------------Agnès Varda’s “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” is a musical about women’s rights, at once both polemical in its borderline-Brechtian lyrics championing birth control and body autonomy, and also eternally playful and inquisitive in the naturalistic study of its central duo’s friendship over many years. Classmates Pauline and Suzanne drift together and apart through the vagaries of life, each following a wildly different path but always retaining a connection to the other. Among other things, it is one of the most gently observed movies ever made about female friendship. One of Varda’s boldest experiments, the film blends various genres and styles. Inspired by a real abortion case, the film incorporates neorealist traits to the extent it casts one of the actual lawyers to recreate the court proceedings, but Varda also sidesteps into gorgeous tableaux vivants and adopts immersive editing patterns to convey the characters’ sense of time passing. And the occasional bursts of song add a dash of whimsy to topics the director takes seriously, using humor and warmth to bring into the open subjects that were still largely taboo in French society. —JC
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Gian Luca Farinelli, the director of the Cineteca and codirector of Il Cinema Ritrovato, tells Lane that he’s noticed that audiences are skewing younger. Especially after the pandemic, he’s sensed “a renewed interest in film, actual celluloid film.” Talking with programmers and organizers at several Chicago repertory hubs as the Music Box Theatre and the Gene Siskel Film Center, Newcity’s Ray Pride hears pretty much the same thing. “And it’s not just that they’re showing up,” says Facets’ Emma Greenleaf, “it’s that they’re returning, bringing friends, and becoming part of a larger culture of discovery.” Jake Isgar of the Alamo Drafthouse finds that the surge “feels a lot like a byproduct of Gen Z and Gen Alpha Letterboxd-centric film culture of the aughts and the last ten years.”
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On his way into a review of Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions—in which Stephen King, Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Karyn Kusama, and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas discuss Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)—A.V. Club film editor Jacob Oller takes a moment to issue a cri de coeur in the wake of the recent firings of several film critics at various prominent publications. “As many in my field have already written,” notes Oller, “it’s not for the normal reasons people lose their jobs. Film reviews from people who know what they’re doing haven’t gotten worse, nor has the appetite for them among moviegoers declined. Rather, studios have figured out that they can simply pay influencers for signal boosts to drown out voices that aren’t bought and paid for, while publications have determined that it’s actually a lot easier to sell ads to media monopolies when you’re not employing someone whose job often involves cutting through their bullshit.”------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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