Celebrating Community
Nearly two years ago, it seemed like Vera Drew’s debut film was doomed. Not because it centered on and was made by a trans woman — a twice-over target in this era of escalating anti-trans bigotry — but because it poked a Hollywood giant. The People’s Joker, billed as a “queer coming-of-age superhero parody,” Jokerizes Drew’s coming out experience. Its main […]
Author Nelson Algren wrote in 1951 about Chicago that, “once you’ve come to this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” That sentiment could also apply to the Brighton Beach neighborhood filmmakers Carol Stein and Susan Wittenberg captured some 30 years […]
It was in September, sitting in the big auditorium at BAM, packed with people, watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi masterpiece Solaris. Near the beginning of the film is a shot of rain dropping into a pond, the water rippling out into green shards of wetland flora — nothing special, necessarily, but the kind of pastoral lyricism Tarkovsky routinely leaned on. […]
At this year’s New York Film Festival, the marquee documentary event was the American premiere of 93-year-old Frederick Wiseman’s latest opus, Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros. La Maison Troisgro, a three-star Michelin restaurant in central France, is at the center of the film, which radiates outward to explore the supply chain of farms that provide much of the place’s food and the […]
The New York Film Festival hits at a strange moment in the calendar. By the time the 61st edition opened on September 29, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto had all hosted their festivals (in May, August, and September, respectively). Many of the year’s banner titles — Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Hayao Miyazaki’s […]
New York is marking the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop at a Bronx block party in 1973 with a packed program of IRL and virtual events, series, and celebrations across the city. (There’s even a special edition New York Public Library library card.) Most of these are centered, obviously, on the music. But at the Museum of the […]
Studs Terkel’s 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a lot of things: a landmark oral history, a monument to conversation, a snapshot of labor across classes and collars at a particular unsettled moment in American history. It’s also a testament to how little things change. Working […]
All the hand wringing and doomsaying around artificial intelligence — in tools like ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, and Midjourney — has made for some lazy movie comparisons. AI is like Skynet in the Terminator movies! These chatbots are a few dataset away from becoming 2001’s HAL 9000! We’re all destined to be mindless slug consumers controlled by corporate AI run amok, […]
Going to the movies right now feels like huffing exhaust. The fumes of tired franchises, hyperfrenetic filmmaking, and cheap sludgy visual effects choke multiplexes and streaming services, strangling creativity and our own good judgment. But there are still rare clearings in the miasma, when a film can be a cleansing blast of the cleanest oxygen that reminds us why we […]
The golden age of Hollywood — lasting from the mid-1920s until the mid-1960s — was dominated by five studios: RKO, MGM, Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros. RKO went belly up in 1957; now a faint whimper of its former roaring lion, MGM is part of the Amazon empire; and Fox has been absorbed into the Disney collective (for its Marvel and […]