
A Hidden Life
It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly…
It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly…
Bombshell is both light on its feet and a punch in the gut.
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An article about the screening of Horace Jenkins' "Cane River" on Friday, November 1st, at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An FFC on Gavin Hood's Official Secrets.
A celebration of Yasujiro Ozu, as written by a Far Flung Correspondent from Egypt.
A tribute to the legendary Anna Karina.
The winners of the CFCA Awards for the best of 2019.
Named after the David Cronenberg film, this is the blog of former RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson, where he has chronicled his enthusiasms and indulged his whims since 2005. Favorite subjects include evidence-based movie criticism, cinematic form and style, comedy, logical reasoning, language, journalism, technology, epistemology and fun. No topic is off-limits, but critical thinking is required.
It's the third door on your...
Kathleen Murphy has written a stunning piece over at Testpattern called "The Haunted Palace." (I've been waiting weeks for it to appear so I could send you there.) Although primarily about Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad," the article moves through those haunted corridors, into Stanley Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, passing through doors (and walls) into the worlds of Max Ophuls, Luis Bunuel, Josef von Sternberg... As you wander through the maze of this "Lady from Shanghai" hall of mirrors you'll catch glimpses of ghosts around every corner -- not just the phantom images of particular movies, but insights into a spectral world Dave Kehr has described as "the lost continent of cinephilia."
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From Kathleen's magnificent guided tour of the grounds:
Once upon a time, movie-loving folk actually, in the words of Susan Sontag, "arranged their emotional and intellectual lives around an art that was 'poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral all at the same time.'" We thrived on films such as "Vertigo" (1958), "L'Avventura" (1960), "Jules and Jim" (1962), "My Life to Live" (1962) -- works that, like [Ophuls'] "Letter From an Unknown Woman," plunged into the very DNA of the cinematic imagination. We happily drowned, not in narrative alone -- or even at all -- but in the seductive images, spaces and faces conjured by the formidable magic of the medium....
"If we take them in, perhaps we will become them." Is there a finer description of cinephilia, or of our need to consume art, to make it part of our own experience, to incorporate it into our psyches, to perhaps even become wiser, broader, better human beings through our exposure to the transcendent? She's at the heart of darkness here -- the darkness of the sanctuary (a movie theater, a home, a hotel room...) in which we view these flickering, mesmerizing images. Movies create illusions and shatter them, mimic dreams and usurp them..... Still, there's a horror movie at the heart of every film about love and art. Death's always abroad in these environs, a reaper whose scythe eventually edits everyone out of the picture. Our avid gaze consumes the images we love; if we take them in, perhaps we will become them. Movies are haunted houses -- full of dead people who come to life again and again for our pleasure.
I don't know about you, but I get shivers from exploring these cinematic environs -- and from reading words like Kathleen's that offer not just a perfectly situated window frame through which to view them, but that present a doorway beckoning you to enter...
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The best films of 2019, as chosen by the staff of RogerEbert.com.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
A review of three premieres from Telluride.
The top 50 shows of the 2010s.