One of our most prolific independent American filmmakers, Richard Linklater, now has two new movies in release. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon are both evocations of transformative moments in, respectively, narrative cinema and Broadway musical theater. Both are period films, ingenious in form and generous in spirit — in other words they are two of the best films of the year. Nouvelle Vague is set in Paris in 1959, when many of the critics who had formed a community around the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had already directed at least one feature. Desperate to catch-up was Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague […]
by Amy Taubin on Nov 4, 2025
Narratives of decline and obsolescence, frequently as a consequence of unforced errors made by the wealthy and unaccountable (the latter adjective redundant when paired with the former), are going to be a big theme this fall. The global political situation is self-evident; zooming down to the media tier, rumors of imminent firings and general bloodletting are swirling. (Wait for those quarterly reports to come in at the top of October and let the pain begin.) Zooming way down to the relatively parochial level of “one specific film festival,” TIFF was once a global powerhouse and automatic stop for the year’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2025