Fran Hoepfner on Nomadland, Lovers Rock, Malmkrog, Undine, The Human Voice, The Truffle Hunters, Night of the Kings and more from this year's (remote) New York Film Festival.
I want to live in the artificial worlds Richard Curtis creates, with their aesthetic rules and regulations, if only to live in a world where problems are surmountable, and everyone is funny.
In describing Cooper Raiff’s emergence onto the independent film scene, it’s easy to lean on what sounds like a novelty hook: at just 23 years old, he’s written, directed, starred in, and co-edited a college-set romcom that went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at South by Southwest.
Alien may have blazed the trail for unlikely female action heroes, but it’s Aliens that made Ripley iconic to girls like me.
Like the push and pull of life, Taste of Cherry is an assortment of contradictions.
Abel Ferrara is a poet of the impotence, the pathos, the zero sum game of socially-acceptable expressions of masculinity.
The relationship between Black American iconoclasm and French noir stylings highlights the contagious nature of social criticism itself, and the immensely broad potential for art and cinema to unite disparate but like-minded cultures.
Where in previous summers Paul Simon’s Concert in the Park was a gleeful way to keep post-concert blues at bay between shows, now it’s a constant battle to try not to cry while listening to it.
How Ganja & Hess (1973) and Soleil O (1967) reflect complexities of Black american and African immigrant experiences.
On queerness, fate, and adaptation as tragedy in Jesus Christ Superstar.
It’s difficult to draw up an exact taxonomy of bad TV. There’s the obvious lowbrow, but there’s also middling-comfort TV that many of us in our 20s and 30s in India still reach for.
For all their quirks, spaghetti westerns are uniquely relevant right now, as we watch the cruel and brutal American story crumble in real time, as we try to manifest a better destiny. Three movies in particular, directed by Italy’s holy trinity of Sergios: Leone, Corbucci, and Sollima.