The latest on Blu-ray and streaming, including Trolls 3 and Criterion releases of Blood Simple, Mudbound, and Trainspotting.
An interview with the director of Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, Chan is Missing, Smoke, and many more.
What the writers of RogerEbert.com have been watching while being stuck at home.
A preview of the 1st Iranian Film Festival, running this weekend in New York.
The latest on Blu-ray and DVD including Coco, Darkest Hour, Murder on the Orient Express, and The Florida Project!
An interview with the legendary James Ivory about the re-release of Heat and Dust and the upcoming Call Me By Your Name.
An appreciation of Richard Schickel, Time magazine film critic and prolific film director and book author.
Raiders of the lost web; Eight highlights of Chicago film fest; Sexism of Bond Girls; Tarantino chats with Ellis; Enablers of pedophile culture.
Interviews with the 2015 Ebert Fellows conducted by Indiewire's Sam Adams.
Criterion partners with Martin Scorsese to offer amazing treasures of world cinema on Blu-ray and DVD.
Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize in literature; film critic Stanley Kauffmann dies at 97; SF Film Society director Ted Hope steps down; documentary oversaturation; Will Self on the changing role of the critic.
Billy Wilder's under-appreciated 1978 "Fedora" returns to Cannes to remind us that some things, like the fear of aging among celebrities, never change.
UPDATED (08/01/12): Scroll to the bottom of this entry to see my first impressions of the newly announced critics' and directors' poll results.
Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (1948) topped the first Sight & Sound critics' poll in 1952, only four years after it was first released, dropped to #7 in 1962, and then disappeared from the top ten never to be seen again. (In 2002 only five of the 145 participating critics voted for it.) Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) flopped in its initial release but was rediscovered in the 1950s after RKO licensed its films to television in 1956. From 1962 to 2002 "Kane" has remained at the top of the poll (46 critics voted for it last time). This year, a whopping 846 top-ten ballots (mentioning 2,045 different titles) were counted, solicited from international "critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles" -- including bloggers and other online-only writers. Sight & Sound has announced it will live-tweet the 2012 "Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" (@SightSoundmag #sightsoundpoll) August 1, and as I write this the night before, I of course don't know the results. But, for now at least, I'm more interested in the process.
Given the much wider and younger selection of voters in 2012, ist-watchers have been speculating: Will another movie (leading candidate: Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," number 2 in 2002) supplant "Kane" at the top of the list? Will there be any silent films in the top 10? (Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" and Murnau's "Sunrise" tied for #7 on the 2002 list, but the latter was released in 1927 with a Fox Movietone sound-on-film musical score and sound effects.)
Though there's been no rule about how much time should pass between a film's initial release and its eligibility (the Library of Congress's National Film Registry requires that selections be at least ten years old), most of the selections ten to have stood the test of time for at least a decade or two. The newest film on the 2002 list was the combination of "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather, Part II" (1974) -- but they won't be allowed to count as one title for 2012.
For the first time in a long time, she has breakfast with her husband. But now, nobody in her house will talk to her. She is Arati, wife of Subrata, and to help pay expenses she starts her first job outside of the home. In Satyajit Ray's tender "Mahanagar" (1963) aka: "Big City", we follow a quiet Indian family's struggles against the nearing claws of modernity.
Great Movies
