Cinethread: big day at @metrographnyc.bsky.social first, Hill of Freedom, one of Hong Sangsoo's greatest films, certainly his most intricate, and—note the title—his most political, 11:15am (this piece traces its themes and connections to other movies and directors: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Le Pont du Nord, in which Jacques Rivette hit the optimal balance of action and ideas, image and performance (thanks especially to the powerful presences of Bulle and Pascale Ogier—and of Paris), at @bambrooklyn.bsky.social at 1: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Elaine May's A New Leaf, in a new restoration, at @ifccenter.bsky.social (6:45pm show introduced by her biographer, Carrie Courogen); at @spectacletheater.com Tony Buba's metafictional classic Lightning Over Braddock, at 7:30pm, +/a Q.& A. with him! www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

5/14/87: Maurice Pialat's Sous Le Soleil De Satan w/Sandrine Bonnaire, Gérard Depardieu Palme d'Or at Cannes (not w/o dissent) More: @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... @glennkenny.bsky.social: mubi.com/en/notebook/... @janetmaslin.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/1987/10/03/m...

Delighted by the Éric Rohmer cornucopia coming to @criterionchannl.bsky.social in June but enduringly dismayed by the unavailability of his first feature, The Sign of Leo, without which the rest of his career makes less sense, because the film is in the vein of the German monumental, and...

A tale of two utopians (and their utopian companions): Shirley Clarke's long-developing 1985 psychoportrait Ornette: Made in America, at @bambrooklyn.bsky.social at 7; the long and short of it: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

In The Wizard of the Kremlin, mild and approximate, the director and co-writer Olivier Assayas doesn't display political or moral imagination, audiovisual inspiration, or narrative audacity befitting the enormities it recounts: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

I'd been wondering about Ozu's 1937 film What Did the Lady Forget?, on @tcmtv.bsky.social at 2:45am (ET), and discovered instead what I'd forgotten: that I'd written about it a while back, and found it excitingly turbulent and bitterly ironic: www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Not to miss: Sophie Letourneur's 2012 comedy Les Coquillettes, with autofictional freedom akin to mumblecore and intricate composition akin to Alain Resnais, in the bittersweet form of uncertain and conflicting memories; at L'Alliance at 4 and 7: www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Five of Ida Lupino's first six features are intimate, insightful, inventive classics; one, The Hitch-Hiker (on @tcmtv.bsky.social at noon tomorrow), is diluted by convention—and, a few years later, she showed, on TV, with "No. 5 Checked Out," what it could and should have been (scroll down:

5/11/66: Alain Resnais masterpiece La Guerre Est Finie [W - the heroic Jorge Semprún: www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/w... w/Yves Montand, Ingrid Thulin + Bujold, Piccoli, Crauchet Our take: midcenturycinema.org/2016/05/13/5... Must-read via @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Great day of All the Single Mothers at @metrographnyc.bsky.social with Kinuyo Tanaka's agonized, exalted Forever a Woman (a.k.a. The Eternal Breasts), all the more astoundingly a bio-pic, 2pm; missing (because unavailable?), John M. Stahl's Only Yesterday, a confrontational melodramatic fusion of...

Its greatness includes bitter ironies regarding guilt and responsibility. No surprise that it quickly followed The Wrong Man.

Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, a multidimensional masterwork of film criticism and history, personal experience, political analysis, and repertory rediscovery—a real-time expansion of the world of cinema—at @bambrooklyn.bsky.social at 3:15pm: www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

5/8/59: Alain Resnais landmark Hiroshima Mon Amour W: Marguerite Duras w/Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada More: @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... Duras via @literaryhub.bsky.social: lithub.com/marguerite-d... @splicedpersonality.bsky.social: crookedmarquee.com/classic-corn...

The tribulations of Mr. Arkadin, a.k.a. Confidential Report, are a real-life gloss on the movie itself and on Orson Welles's own anguish; the movie is harrowingly great and profoundly, wrenchingly, confessionally painful; it's at @bambrooklyn.bsky.social at 4:15pm in 35mm....

The problem with Blue Film isn't what it's about but the glib and trivializing approach to its many subjects, and a bland and tasteless aesthetic that isn't up to those subjects. The result is sensationalistic, grossly insensitive.

Don't forget Brad Pitt interrupting dinner with the Fourth Symphony in The Tree of Life! www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZXi...

Wonderful news that Jean-Pierre Gorin will be at L'Alliance June 2-11 to present three of his films and three others of his choice; he's one of the greatest critics, or, more, cinema-thinkers (his notes, below, are a prime example) and interlocutors... lallianceny.org/event/why-be...

On Brahms's birthday, a note on his mighty cinematic imprint: the Clarinet Quintet starts A Song Is Born, the 2nd Piano Concerto a co-star of A Letter to Three Wives, the Academic Festival Overture conducted in People Will Talk; he packs romantic extremes in starkly compressed gestures,...

The Magnificent Ambersons, it's worth noting on Orson Welles's birthday, is his exemplary film because it distills his world into a single word, "comeuppance": his art and his life are the story of a great man humbled, and that word and that story are Shakespearean: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Norman Mailer's self-promoting, self-parodying, self-abasing third feature, Maidstone (rumblecore, bumblecore, rough-and-tumblecore), is playing tonight at @anthologyfilm.bsky.social at 8:45pm., in 35mm.: www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

5/5/54: Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar w/Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden + + So out there it goes to 11 More: @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-... @honorszombie.bsky.social: www.bkmag.com/2015/11/11/t... @antbit.projectedfigures.com: lwlies.com/home-ents/jo...

With the wonderful news that Whit Stillman is about to make a new film (set in England in 1943), worth remembering that 1. he's a great political filmmaker, as in Love & Friendship... www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

5/4/59: François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (DP Henri Decaë) w/Jean-Pierre Léaud+ Rémy, Maurier, Decomble More: @agnescpoirier.bsky.social: engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the... @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... @jhoberman.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/m...

One of the greatest films, and a veiled self-portrait: Utamaro and His Five Women, on 35mm., at Metrograph at 7; Mizoguchi is grossly underappreciated now (unlike Ozu and Rohmer, his splendor and fury burst through small screens) www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Thread: a remarkable restoration, of Last Summer (5pm at the Paris Theater) directed by Frank Perry, written by Eleanor Perry, and rescued by Larry Karaszewski, who'll do a Q.&A. with one of its stars, Richard Thomas; an intimate drama of oblivious teen cruelty that maps its monstrosities...

Greatly enjoyed Daniel Raim's documentary The Ozu Diaries (coming to @tcmtv.bsky.social May 5 and launching a series of twenty films of Ozu's), which looks closely at Ozu's ideas and inspirations and helps dispel enduring misconceptions about his films (scroll down: www.newyorker.com/culture/goin...

This is a tough one because he keeps getting better and because they're (almost) all so close that it's like picking chunks from one continuous film: Asteroid City The French Dispatch Rushmore (the great detonator) Moonrise Kingdom The Grand Budapest Hotel

Strangely, Two Pianos illuminates a big swath of film history and Desplechin's place in it; writing about his eternal youth, though, I paused to compare with his generational counterpart, Leos Carax—to whom I'd sooner attribute both enduring childhood and precocious old age.

Much to discover in what's new on @criterionchannl.bsky.social and delighted that Lou Ye's An Unfinished Film, which came out briefly last year, is now there, too (reminder that his great, intricate, paranoid wartime neo-noir, Saturday Fiction, is already there): www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Reminder that Red River plays a central role in Howard Hawks's work because the casting of Montgomery Clift opposite John Wayne unleashed new visions of violence (and how to stylize them); on @tcmtv.bsky.social at 3am (ET): www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

With a few minutes left in Jazz Day, bring the heat: Night of the Cookers, which I listened to a couple of days ago for the first time in a while and was again astounded and overwhelmed by its intensity: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVRF...

4/30/57: Yasujiro Ozu masterpiece Tokyo Twilight w/Setsuko Hara, Ineko Arima, Chishû Ryû A harder edge for Ozu More: @peutetre.bsky.social: criterioncast.com/column/a-jou... @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab... @reverseshot.bsky.social: reverseshot.org/archive/entr...

For all its frustrations (and there are plenty), Arnaud Desplechin's latest film, Two Pianos (opening tomorrow), is absorbing and stimulating: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Once more, on Duke Ellington's birthday: composer, bandleader, communicator, painter in sound, he was also one of the greatest of pianists, and Money Jungle gets my vote for best jazz album ever—the one most like a Beethoven late quartet, of inexhaustible depth and mystery.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2: a pretty good pile of stuff. www.newyorker.com/2026/05/11/t...

Visconti may be the diametrical opposite of Antonioni in the postwar Italian cinematic pantheon, but the film that his 1951 melodrama Bellissima (opening Friday at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social in a new restoration) is closely related to (and maybe inspired?) is The Lady Without Camelias:

Éric Rohmer 1981 @cahiersducinema.bsky.social "I've always made films so that what's interesting comes from thinking it over, not just from an immediate impression. When someone asks my opinion right after a film, I can't answer, it takes at least overnight, I have to have dreamt about it."

Could change every day, but... All That Heaven Allows Imitation of Life There's Always Tomorrow A Scandal in Paris Week-End with Father

Éric Rohmer, from 1981, in @cahiersducinema.bsky.social on sound in The Aviator's Wife: "The sound was taken with lavaliers and transmitters. With Georges Prat, the sound engineer, hidden in the bushes...And also, sometimes, a boom captured ambience to make up for the radio mike's inadequacies...

With the retrospective of Sophie Letourneur's films at L'Alliance (where I had the pleasure of seeing her new one, L'Aventura, +Q.&A. detailing her singular methods), Le Cinéma Club is showing her featurette Le Marin Masqué (The Shady Sailor), made in similarly extraordinary ways:

Great fun reading 1970 interview with Éric Rohmer in the @cahiersducinema.bsky.social special issue devoted to him: "I'm not afraid of being too close to life. I'm seeking to eliminate what still distances me from it, even if I know that I'll never succeed, though I think it's possible that

4/24/84: Stop Making Sense - The Talking Heads via Jonathan Demme More: @janetmaslin.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/1984/10/19/m... @szacharek.bsky.social: www.salon.com/1999/09/16/s... @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

"Michael" isn't a disaster but it's hollowed out by unfortunate omissions (and not just the obvious one), which is all the more disheartening because what's there is, for the most part, engaging and detailed: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Maurice Pialat, a true filmmaker's filmmaker (whose influence is both widespread and burdensome), at @filmlinc.bsky.social with the miniseries La Maison des Bois, plus three films—today, À Nos Amours and L'Enfance Nue; an overview of his harsh cinematic universe... www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

All three of these albums are great. (I wrote the liner notes to the Cecil Taylor release.)

HBD Elaine May!!! #70s New Leaf; Heartbreak Kid; masterpiece Mikey & Nicky More @chadperman.bsky.social w/ @carriecourogen.bsky.social: www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2024/06/14/a... @danschindel.bsky.social: www.screenslate.com/articles/sce... @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Extraordinary, instantly canonical new albums of previously unreleased live recordings by Cecil Taylor, Ahmad Jamal, and Joe Henderson, now available thanks to Zev Feldman, Resonance Records, and Elemental Music: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

4/20/64: François Truffaut's The Soft Skin Deeply personal film a clinic in Hitchcockian techniques More: @labuzamovies.com: thefilmstage.com/every-man-fo... @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... @kphipps3000.bsky.social: thedissolve.com/reviews/1430...