Busy day in the land of cinema: Agnès Varda's Faces Places, a lovely and incisive film unfortunately overwhelmed by an absence that's still a presence, @filmforumnyc.bsky.social 12:20pm; a timely screening of Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, which figures in my piece on the ongoing modern

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Great Beethoven today thanks to Jeremy Denk playing the 1st piano concerto w/the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at @92ndstreety.bsky.social and re-revealing Beethoven as strange and manifold—eruptive, introspective, playful, visionary—and all this in just the mighty first-movement cadenza...

On Rudolf Serkin's birthday (born on this day in 1903), a word on the mighty boxed set of his Columbia performances that's one of the crucial recorded legacies, of titanic struggle with music too great to be played and too great not to be: www.newyorker.com/culture/2017...

A Dragon Arrives!, Mani Haghighi's teeming, time-leaping 2016 drama of repression and resistance in 1965 (a prime precursor of The Secret Agent) is among the 21st century's best films, for reasons discussed here—but programmers, distributors, and critics failed it and the cinema:

Nadav Lapid's new film, Yes, is essential viewing—wild, angry, teeming with reckless energy and barbed details, and romantically melancholy—but its form isn't as free or open as its first-person fury and quasi-documentary substance demand: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Next week's column is a Critic at Large piece on movies that were a thrill to watch and an honor to call attention to: undistributed films by Mani Haghighi and the great modern tradition of Iranian cinema that he's extending; in print Monday: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Today in Agnès Varda @filmforumnyc.bsky.social The Gleaners and I, 2:40pm; The Beaches of Agnès, 4:30pm—the modern auteur test, making the body of work the work of the body: filmmakers holding cameras, putting themselves onscreen, and making something of it that's the equal of their fiction.

Rare and remarkable: Anne-Marie Miéville's last film (to date), tonight at @anthologyfilm.bsky.social at 9:15pm; a confrontational romantic comedy in shape, harrowing melodrama in tone, in which she acts alongside Godard and Claude Perron: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Today in J.L. and J.-L. G., farewells, @anthologyfilm.bsky.social: Cracking Up, a.k.a. Smorgasbord, 6:45pm (with some of his most astounding comedic set pieces), and Soigne ta Droite (Keep Your Right Up), at 9 (with some great music scenes—with Les Rita Mitsouko). www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Agnès Varda's films about Jacques Demy are among my favorites—Jacquot de Nantes @filmforumnyc.bsky.social 8pm, is the best movie I've seen about hands-on filmmaking and the rise of a vocation; The World of Jacques Demy, 1pm, is a trip through the inner life that no one else could have taken.

Godard's 1990 film Nouvelle Vague, at @anthologyfilm.bsky.social at 9:15pm. in 35mm., is one of his supreme achievements—the last classic, the last to exalt the 35mm. image and the mythologies that go with it; a two-part story of the double (both Alain Delon) and his return—a resurrection...

Wes Anderson's films are underappreciated because many critics worry that criticism isn't a serious-enough activity and therefore reject his comedic (albeit complex, substantial, even philosophical) approach to his films' truly serious matters. Dourness is taken for importance.

1. Le Rayon Vert 2. Full Moon in Paris 3. The Marquise of O... 4. The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediathèque 5. A Summer's Tale + The Bakery Girl of Monceau Rohmer is the most misunderstood great filmmaker, which is among the first things I wrote back in the day: www.newyorker.com/magazine/200...

Two prime films by Boris Barnet at @metrographnyc.bsky.social Outskirts 6:40pm, By the Bluest of Sea 8:45pm, both introduced by Edo Choi; a 1959 interview w/Barnet, @cahiersducinema.bsky.social 169, Aug. 1965: "My favorites: The Girl with the Hatbox, Outskirts, and Annushka, which I just finished."

3/20/61: Allen Baron's NYC neo-noir gem Blast of Silence w/VO via (blacklisted) Lionel Stander @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: “one of the greatest of New York movies” More: @thejoedante.bsky.social: trailersfromhell.com/blast-silence/ @nick-luciano.bsky.social: filmobsessive.com/film/film-fe...

Jerry Lewis wrecks Hollywood (and vice versa) in The Errand Boy, at @anthologyfilm.bsky.social at 6:30pm in 35mm.; the Stones wreck the Age of Aquarius in Gimme Shelter at Maysles Documentary Center at 7; and Robert Aldrich wrecks the world in Kiss Me Deadly at @metrographnyc.bsky.social at 4:

Musicals: Jerry Lewis's The Ladies Man (his zenith of invention), @anthologyfilm.bsky.social 6:30pm; Agnès Varda's One Sings, The Other Doesn't, a quietly wild genre mashup, @filmforumnyc.bsky.social 8:10pm; George Cukor's Let's Make Love, Marilyn Monroe at her most spontaneous, @moma.bsky.social 7:

Living on Velvet, Frank Borzage's novelistic 1935 melodrama (Fitzgerald-and-Hemingwayesque) is rapturous, high-spirited, pain-filled; brief word on it, and a fuller one on its place in the Borzageverse; on @tcmtv.bsky.social at 2: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Take the title seriously: Éloge de l'amour (In Praise of Love) is one of Godard's supreme masterworks, its rejection was a disaster, and it won't be appreciated until another grave failure is remedied—volume 2 of Godard on Godard (edited by Alain Bergala) hasn't been translated.

Today in Agnès Varda at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social two sixties masterworks of inextricably intertwined fantasy and reality, The Creatures at 3:15pm and Lions Love (...and Lies) at 8:30pm, which also spotlight her own idiosyncratic relationship to the cinema itself: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Also, regarding the première of Breathless in France in 1960, here's the wonderful review in @newyorker.com from its NY release the following year—by Roger Angell, who saw the future in it: www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...

3/16/46: The Blue Dahlia W: Raymond Chandler D: George Marshall P: John Houseman w Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, William Bendix Nifty noir survives wacky PCA imposed ending @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social links w/Best Years More: Crowther: www.nytimes.com/1946/05/09/a... James Agee: archive.org/details/nati...

A word from a while back on how Godard eventually felt about Breathless: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

The art of movies has progressed, while the business is at risk; the Oscars last night reflected that crisis: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

With her first feature, La Pointe Courte, Agnès Varda instantly extended the philosophical modernism of Resnais (who edited it) and Antonioni, and ran ahead of a New Wave that didn't yet exist; at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social 5:30pm, introduced by programmer extraordinaire David Schwartz:...

The first feature that Jerry Lewis directed, The Bellboy, not a silent film but a film about silence—and, strangely, another there-but-for-the-grace-of-God movie in the line of Limelight and All About Eve—in 35mm. at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social at 11:  www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

I've always been put off by the kind of pop-coercive advocacy of movies (in theatres) and the performing arts that Steven Spielberg puts forth—"at the end of a really good movie experience, we are all united"; some of my best movie experiences, much or most of the audience hated.

The 1926 serial Miss Mend, directed by Boris Barnet and Fedor Ozep, is the most Tashlinesque silent film I've seen; it's at @metrographnyc.bsky.social at 1:30pm: www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

The city is overwhelming; if I weren't a little under the weather and a lot on deadline, I'd be at @metrographnyc.bsky.social for Boris Barnet silents; the Agnès Varda retrospective at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social offers Cléo from 5 to 7 (at 8), introduced and w/Q. & A. by her biographer Carrie Rickey;

3/11/71: Elaine May's A New Leaf, w/May & Matthau Boffo @vinsyn.bsky.social SE: vinegarsyndrome.com/products/a-n... More: @rifewithkatie.bsky.social: www.rogerebert.com/women-writer... @kimmorgan.bsky.social: thenewbev.com/blog/2017/05... @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Repertory gems include: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, one of Fassbinder's conceptual masterworks, at the Quad at 8:30pm; and Parajanov's ecstatic historical ethnography in The Legend of Suram Fortress (co-directed, maybe nominally, by Dodo Abashidze,who also acts in it), @bambrooklyn.bsky.social at 7pm:

Creed showed Ryan Coogler leveraging studio conventions into a mighty, probing, harshly ironic drama of power and access; tonight at @nitehawkcinema.bsky.social Prospect Park at 9:15pm in 35mm.: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Between paragraphs, went down a baseball rabbit hole and learned something that I'd missed when it was happening: Steve Boros, as manager of the A's in 1983-84, is considered the first one to use sabermetrics and make game decisions based on computerized statistical analyses.

Three favorites today, two at @metrographnyc.bsky.social: Leos Carax's meteoric Mauvais Sang, 4:35pm, and Claire Simon introducing The Competition (Le Concours), inside film school, 9:40pm. Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home—a mournful, lyrical endgame—at @movingimagenyc.bsky.social at 4, in 35mm.:

I would settle for Sofia Coppola's The Custom of the Country actually just getting made as originally planned!

Great repertory day, including West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, Med Hondo's ebullient and indignant musical of colonialism, its profiteers, and its resisters, at @movingimagenyc.bsky.social at 4, introduced by Ashley Clark: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Yam Daabo (The Choice), Idrissa Ouédraogo's first feature, is a great new arrival on @criterionchannl.bsky.social (it's also in @criterion.bsky.social) and a reminder that major discoveries in cinematic form sometimes arise modestly and (unfortunately) unheralded:  www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

3/6/67: Ingmar Bergman's Persona (NYC) 🙏🙏 w/Bibi & Liv, + Gunnar From Us: midcenturycinema.org/2017/03/09/5... More: @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/magazine/201... @gointothestory.bsky.social: gointothestory.blcklst.com/classic-60s-... Susan Sontag: scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/perso...

Claude Lanzmann's colossal, historic, nearly metaphysical Shoah—a conjuring—screens at L'Alliance today at 6/tomorrow at 4, introduced by Arnaud Desplechin; three words from a while back: www.newyorker.com/magazine/201... www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Saw the Buckley-Mescal cat-astrophe, and the real issue isn't feline; it's that they're much looser, freer, more fun there than they're allowed to be in the movies for which they're acclaimed—in which they're directed to act dour and never seem like the people in the interview.

Can't do both: Shoes, Lois Weber's 1916 silent film of a woman's silenced despair @filmforumnyc.bsky.social 6:10pm (w/piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner); Husbands, John Cassavetes's death-stunned, horrific, horrified vision of men's lives of loud desperation @anthologyfilm.bsky.social 7pm, 35mm.

The Bride! has such a good premise, built on a sound principle, with so many fascinating implications, that its failure to develop them is all the more disappointing: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

His last great film (to date).

Reminded by @liberation.fr that it's the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Marguerite Duras, whose films are as rare here now as they were then, including her incomparable masterwork of story-telling, The Truck; a word on its cinematic place and another on its psychological one:...

The Bigamist, Ida Lupino's last feature with her own production company—a great melodrama with the flair and the freedom of independence and the ratcheted-up passion of filming herself—screens tonight at 8 at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social introduced by Melissa Anderson www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Le Pont du Nord L'Amour fou The Gang of Four Haut Bas Fragile Paris Belongs to Us

Max Ophuls, cine-historian: Lola Montès, at Metrograph at 2:15pm, with European politics meeting Barnum spectacle; From Mayerling to Sarajevo (not in the series); and Le Plaisir, the living image of France in the age of Maupassant:  www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

2/28/71: Barbara Loden's indie landmark Wanda More via: A party of favorites: www.criterion.com/current/post... @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... @cinemiasma.bsky.social: www.bloomsbury.com/us/wanda-978... @kristinmjones.bsky.social: www.frieze.com/article/barb...

What Does That Nature Say to You, opening today at @lincolncenter.bsky.social, is one of the most lucid and volatile of Hong Sangsoo's films—its roaring power is couched in a near-pop story:  www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...