Ida Lupino has gone through a re-evaluation recently, lifting her from the ranks of a female director occasionally referenced for a single contribution to cinema to her rightful place as a major auteur. This is thanks in part to a renewed focus on female filmmakers and the efforts […]
At one point in Robert Eggers’s nightmarish dreamscape The Lighthouse, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) holds forth over the cowering form of Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson). Wake curses his acolyte to the depths with intimations of mythology, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Old Testament fire-and-brimstone, as the camera maintains a […]
For those not yet inaugurated into the oeuvre of influential B-movie producer Val Lewton, the Criterion Channel has you covered. The most famous of Lewton’s films is the Jacques Tourneur-directed Cat People, starring Simone Simon as a haunted young woman who may or may not turn into a […]
There are some films that fail to live up to their hype, and there are others whose hype, it seems, fails to live up to them. This is certainly true of Mati Diop’s remarkable directorial debut Atlantics, now showing at NYFF57. Atlantics has received exceptional praise out of […]
Parasite is probably one of the most deceptive films in theaters this year, but not because it looks like one thing and proves to be another. Rather, it is exactly what it looks like, and yet also isn’t, like Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck. Revealing its basic premise won’t spoil it […]
Pain and Glory, now at the New York Film Festival, marks the eighth time Pedro Almodovar and Antonio Banderas have worked together, in a long collaboration that began in the 1980s, at the beginning of both their careers. That relationship informs Pain and Glory‘s narrative, as Banderas creates […]
Celine Sciamma’s gorgeous Portrait of a Lady on Fire meticulously constructs the relationship of Marianne (Noemie Merlant), a portrait painter, and Heloise (Adele Haenel), her initially reluctant subject. Marianne is hired by the Countess (Valerie Golino) to paint Heloise’s portrait, in an effort to secure her marriage to […]
Listen to Citizen Dame now
