One bit of footage shows issues of Film Culture magazine, which Mekas started in 1954 with his brother Adolfas, rolling from a printing press. Several of Mekas’s segments show the buzz of activity at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which he co-founded in 1961 to distribute little-known movies. Mekas was also the first full-time film critic for … Read more
A blasphemous black comedy, part noir, part case history, Luis Buñuel’s 1953 Mexican melodrama “Él” amply justifies its inadvertently self-reflexive American release title, “This Strange Passion.” One of the rediscoveries of last year’s Buñuel retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “Él” opens for a week at Film Forum in a fine new 4K restoration. … Read more
“We all want to be like Bugs, but we’re all really Daffy,” said the voice actor Eric Bauza with a hearty laugh during a recent interview in Los Angeles. For the past five years, the Canadian performer, 45, has played both the clever rabbit and the hyperactive duck. He has won two Children’s & Family … Read more
“The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.” Not bloody likely. Those stage directions from Tennessee Williams’s published script for “A Streetcar Named Desire” may amount to a mission statement … Read more
Stanley R. Jaffe, a former Hollywood wunderkind who became president of Paramount at 29, then left after just a few years to become an Oscar-winning producer of films like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Fatal Attraction” and “The Accused,” died on Monday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 84. His daughter Betsy Jaffe confirmed … Read more
Inside a dark theater in Midtown Manhattan, Allison McCulloch watched “Kraven the Hunter,” an origin story for the obscure Spider-Man villain, while jotting notes on a white piece of paper smaller than a Post-it. Fur clothing. Taxidermied animals. Characters eating steak. McCulloch is the Roger Ebert of vegans, a dedicated cinephile who cares as much … Read more
“I don’t know how you get justice from an accident.” In 2021, the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot on the set of the movie “Rust.” The new Hulu documentary “Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna,” directed by Rachel Mason, a friend of Hutchins, is not a chronicle of Hutchins’s life, nor a … Read more
Being the 6-year-old daughter of Mark Krotov, the publisher and one of the editors of the literary magazine n+1, is an all-access pass to New York City’s foreign films and contemporary art. “She’s always very, very receptive to stuff,” he said of his daughter, Daria Krotov-Clarke, whom he and his wife, Chantal Clarke, a writer, … Read more
One night shortly before the Oscars ceremony, my boyfriend decided to catch up on “Flow,” the animated film from Latvia that would go on to win best animated feature. When I returned home from dinner, I found that the film had also captured the attention of another viewer — my dog Daisy, a corgi mix. … Read more
‘Coconut Head Generation’ Stream it on Ovid. A room, a dusty projector and a small screen mounted on the wall. That’s pretty much all there is to the Thursday Film Series, a movie club started by students at the prestigious University of Ibadan in Nigeria, which forms the focus of Alain Kassanda’s documentary. But from … Read more