2016: not a good year for most people, and certainly not for Frank Beauvais. His Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is the opening night film at this year’s sixth annual Art of the Real series, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s perspective on the year in nonfiction. Handily for me, Beauvais (a music supervisor and documentarian making his feature debut) has written his own IMDb synopsis, upon which I cannot improve: January 2016. The love story that brought me to this village in Alsace where I live ended six months ago. At 45, I am now alone, without a car, a job […]

The trailer for Jean-Luc Godard’s latest cine-essay, The Image Book, has arrived. Winner of a special Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film revisits, reworks and reflects upon excerpts from cinema history. Blake Williams, in his dispatch from Cannes, described it as a “densely layered work of montage,” in line with much of Godard’s late period. Kino Lorber will release The Image Book in New York on January 26, and in Los Angeles on February 15.

Nick Nolte had walked into a bar. Nolte was a constant in a screenwriting partner’s Malibu hinterlands, hair ever elevated, stalking across a parking lot to Coogie’s for the midafternoon breakfast, resplendent in striped Sulka pajamas and happy dudgeon. This time, it was dark and it was Toronto, across from the Sutton Hotel headquarters of the festival. The upstairs of now long-defunct Bistro 990 on this night in the late 1990s is rich with heightened voices but not shouting. I’m standing near Nolte with a cofounder of Indiewire, Mark Rabinowitz. Our eyes literally grow large just as our ears figuratively […]

Last week I had coffee with American filmmaker/projectionist/translator Ted Fendt, and he said something that has, as I’d expected, stayed with me during my time watching and thinking about movies in Cannes. He suggested—or at least wondered aloud—that the lack of great writing on Jean-Luc Godard’s late period might be attributable to the fact that it is so difficult for critics to match the radicality of the films themselves. I was immediately inclined to push back against the idea, just as I was intrigued by it, and proceeded to wonder if a thorough exegesis of a Godard film might be […]

“How has La Chinoise aged?” asks Amy Taubin in her liner notes to the new Blu-ray edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 provocation. Elsewhere in the disc’s accompanying booklet Richard Hell examines how he has shifted positions from seeing La Chinoise as lesser Godard to “a glorious experience” superior to more easily accessible works like Pierrot le fou. Both critics circle around one of the things I find most fascinating about Godard in general, which is the fact that his movies, more than those of any other filmmaker, seem to change the most drastically from one viewing to the next. Of […]

Amongst the many tributes pouring out today to the late, great Jerry Lewis, slot this interview clip of Jean-Luc Godard from The Dick Cavett Show in 1980. Seeing him as continuing the great physical comedy tradition of Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton, Godard goes on to extoll Lewis’s precise framing and sense of geometry. “But do you find him funny,” Cavett asks, and the answer is worth rolling this clip.

It only dawned on me last week — midway through four consecutive days spent at Lincoln Center’s Jean-Pierre Léaud retrospective — that Olivier Assayas and Philippe Garrel are essentially contemporaries. This isn’t obvious if you look at their filmographies: Garrel made his first short in 1964 (when he was all of 16!) and his first feature three years later. Assayas didn’t make his first short until 1979 and his first feature until 1986; looking at those dates, they’d appear to be filmmakers from different generations, even if at least somewhat temperamentally aligned in their backgrounds (both began as painters). Garrel was born in 1948, Assayas in 1955, and […]

Anna Karina is, along with Gena Rowlands, my favorite actress of all time. The seven and a half films that she made with Jean-Luc Godard constitute, arguably, the most influential body of work in the history of cinema. They certainly were more important in my own development as a filmmaker than any of the other countless masterpieces I fell in love with in the course of my cinematic education. Those seven and a half films redefined and redrew the map of what cinema is and could be more radically than anything I had seen before or since. Godard’s relationship with […]

Explaining why Philippe Garrel is one of my favorite working directors can be difficult. Talking with a co-worker, I tried to sketch out his recurring interests: “he makes movies about men, often directors, who cheat on women and have trouble with themselves.” She rolled her eyes, and I’m not blaming her: what, again? Garrel began making movies as a teenager, and his early work that I’ve seen is both gorgeous and the epitome of stereotypical arthouse pretension of the period. There is 1968’s Le lit de la vierge, a very of-its-time film about a particularly mopey Jesus, and 1975’s Le berceau […]

The formal title of Hitchcock/Truffaut (alternately Hitchcock and The Cinema According to Alfred Hitchcock) is a vexed question mooted by its famous title design: Hitchcock’s name on one side, François Truffaut’s on the other. First published in 1966 and revised before Truffaut’s death, it’s one of the most commonly name-checked starter texts for anyone looking to learn more about film. In a series of extensive, probing and relatively unguarded conversations, Truffaut guides Hitchcock through his work film-by-film. Illustrated by numerous stills (including one- and two-page layouts showing every shot choice from particularly famous/intense sequences, breaking them down in a lucid, teachable way), the book allows a director in total command […]