Bellar-Tadier, Luna. "The Lesbian Allure and Colonial Unconscious of Todd Field’s Tár." Another Gaze (January 25, 2023) ["Tár is a rare film for this reason. Lydia’s type of appeal is not one that is depicted often, consisting as it does of the attractiveness and the desire that belong to a self-assured, powerful older woman who possesses no stereotypical feminine charm, but only the imposing matter-of-factness of her accomplishment, and a masculinity subtle enough to be invisible to an untrained or uninterested eye. Furthermore, Tár promises to deal precisely with the deep ambivalence which stems from the way such a figure both troubles and upholds existing modes of power. This appeal remains largely illegible in our heteronormative world (and in fact its general illegibility is an important part of its experience). It’s thrilling to see someone like this on the big screen, and to know that a straight audience is being made to understand that a young and conventionally attractive woman would pursue her (“Can I text you?” asks red bag woman, grasping Lydia’s hands when their flirtation is cut short by Francesca’s agitated intervention). Moreover, inasmuch as Tár echoes the plethora of contemporary “#MeToo” narratives, depicting this appeal is crucial to telling this story responsibly, for to not give the viewer a window into her desirability – sexual or otherwise – would render the women that flock to her mere dupes."]
Cucarro, Clara. "Quiet Americans: Kelly Reichardt’s Cinema of Attention." Notebook (October 17, 2025) ["Across 30 years of Reichardt’s cinema, mundane details and subtle gestures are often tasked with conveying the essence of her human dramas. In a profile for The New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix calls Reichardt America’s “finest observer of ordinary grit.” The description is apt, though her protagonists have depth as well as texture; their precise cultural and historical resonances belie their “ordinariness.” Reichardt’s filmography revolves around quiet Americans whose shyness, reticence, or reserve may be, at least in part, a response to the social conditions of their gender, class, and race. Think of Wendy (Michelle Williams), the drifter at the center of Wendy and Lucy (2008), whose economic precarity is evident in the way she counts her change and avoids eye contact; or Jamie (Lily Gladstone), the lonely Indigenous American ranch hand in Certain Women (2016), whose romantic longing for a professional white woman, Beth (Kristen Stewart), is never put into words. Avoiding unnatural dialogue that could reveal too much about her characters, Reichardt focuses on behavior, gesture, and routine, asking viewers to extrapolate character through visual cues rather than verbal exposition."]
Cunningham, Vinson, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz. "How Sinners Revives the Vampire." Critics at Large (May 1, 2025) ["The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is no exception. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss what “Sinners,” which fuses historical realism with monster-movie-style horror, illuminates about America in 2025. They trace the archetype from such nineteenth-century texts as “The Vampyre” and “Dracula” to the “Twilight” moment of the aughts, when Edward Cullen, an ethical bloodsucker committed to abstinence, turned the vampire from a predatory outsider into a Y.A. heartthrob. What do he and his ilk have to say today? “The vampire is the one who can unsettle our notions, and maybe give us new notions,” Cunningham says. “The vampire comes in and asks, ‘But have you considered this?’ ”"]
Del Toro, Guillermo. "Frankenstein Director Guillermo del Toro." IndieWire's Filmmakers Toolkit (November 9, 2025) ["Beloved Director Guillermo del Toro sits down with the Filmmaker Toolkit to talk about making his dream film, and how 'Frankenstein' has been a part of each of his prior films. Then del Toro opens up about an end to his era of monster movies, and how achieving this lifelong goal may be the start of a new chapter in his filmmaking style."]
Hudson, David. "Noah Baumbach in L.A." Current (November 6, 2025) ["Sandler is up for a Gotham Award for his supporting performance in Jay Kelly, and the Gothams have already announced that this year’s Director Tribute will be going to Baumbach. George Clooney leads a packed cast as Jay Kelly, “the last of the great Hollywood stars,” as Ron (Sandler), his overworked manager, calls him. Writing about Jay Kelly for Film Comment, Molly Haskell finds that what’s “most interesting is the stark and increasingly awkward question that resounds with urgency . . . Can such an inherently unequal relationship, akin to master and slave, ever evolve into friendship? And how, if not, must that rankle?”"]
---. "Peter Watkins: Prescience and Punishment." Current (November 4, 2025) ["When the late, great independent distributor New Yorker Films began releasing the work of Peter Watkins on DVD in the mid-2000s, Amy Taubin wrote in Artforum that “at long last,” the moment may have come for “the most prescient, innovative, and accomplished of overlooked English-language movie masters.” Watkins passed away last Thursday, one day after turning ninety and twenty-five years after completing his last major work, La commune (Paris, 1871)."]
Lahr, John. "Every Blink." The London Review of Books (October 23, 2025) [A review of Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design by Walter Murch. Book description: "Highly lauded film editor, director, writer and sound designer Walter Murch reflects on the six decades of cinematic history he has been a considerable contributor to - and on what makes great films great.
Together with Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch abandoned Hollywood in 1969 and moved to San Francisco to create the Zoetrope studio. Their vision was of a new kind of cinema for a new generation of film-goers. Murch's subsequent contributions in film editing rooms and sound-mixing theatres were responsible for ground-breaking technical and creative innovations. In this book, Murch invites readers on a voyage of discovery through film, with a mixture of personal stories, meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies, and reminiscences from working on The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Lucas' American Grafitti, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley. Suddenly Something Clicked is a book that will change the way you watch movies."]
Together with Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch abandoned Hollywood in 1969 and moved to San Francisco to create the Zoetrope studio. Their vision was of a new kind of cinema for a new generation of film-goers. Murch's subsequent contributions in film editing rooms and sound-mixing theatres were responsible for ground-breaking technical and creative innovations. In this book, Murch invites readers on a voyage of discovery through film, with a mixture of personal stories, meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies, and reminiscences from working on The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Lucas' American Grafitti, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley. Suddenly Something Clicked is a book that will change the way you watch movies."]
Moran, Dan and Mike Takla. "The Beast: A Film by Bertrand Botello." Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics (November 10, 2025) ["Have you ever felt that you keep making the same mistakes or that you have fallen into a pattern that could be Exhibit A as proof of reincarnation? The Beast (2023) uses all kinds of world-building and three different timelines to explore these ideas–and does so while faithfully adapting a 1903 story by Henry James. It’s the kind of film in which one could be lost in the red arrows that point out movie Easter eggs all over YouTube, but the real draw of the film is its incredible performances and how it combines intricate plotting with emotional weight."]
Riley, Boots. "On Sorry to Bother You and Communism." The Dig (August 9, 2018) ["Sorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead serious shitiness of life under neoliberalism's flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a form of expropriation reminiscent of full-on slave labor—all at the mercy of the thinly-veiled barbarity of Palo Alto-style techno-utopianism. It's about how capitalist society divides and conquers friends and family to claim not only our obedience but also our very souls, and about how the task of left organizing is to see through that game and fight together. Dan's guest today is Boots Riley, who wrote and directed the film and also fronts the left-wing hip hop group The Coup."]
Risker, Paul. "Devastating Truths and Transformation Through 'Soft Power': An Interview with Farah Nabulsi." Cineaste (Fall 2025) ["Nabulsi describes The Teacher as a fiction film that is heavily rooted in truth, reality, and the injustices that are taking place. While she draws inspiration from different real-life stories, there is one that she says was a notable influence—the story of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006 and held until 2011. His eventual release secured the safe return of over a thousand Palestinian political prisoners. Nabulsi tells me that many of these prisoners were women and children that were held without trial or charge in administrative detention. “I was thinking, what an insane imbalance in value for human life.” The Teacher effectively penetrates the pseudo-complexity of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict by showing there's nothing complex about it. Mainstream news media and geopolitics have sought to create a myth of complexity, but Nabulsi takes us into the effects apartheid and forced occupation have on ordinary people. The Teacher is an important film because it gives a voice to the collective Palestinian trauma that is still denied by many in the international community."]
Wright, Joe. "Mussolini: Son of the Century: Joe Wright Gazes into the Abyss." MUBI Podcast (October 30, 2025) ["Joe Wright is known for Oscar-winning WWII epics like Darkest Hour (2007). But his latest look at the era is a different animal: the nightmarish series Mussolini: Son of the Century (2025), about the rise of the godfather of fascism. Joe tells host Rico Gagliano about the Italian dictator, the echoes he sees in politics today...and why he spent his teenage years blasting ’30s pop tunes."]
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