On Film
A Kind of Requiem
This week: Bi Gan, Radu Jude, a new Film Quarterly, and of course, more year-end lists and polls.
Ninety Features Set for Sundance 2026
Charli XCX stars in three of them, and another highlight is a restored documentary by the late William Greaves.
Eisenstein in Vienna
To celebrate the centennial of Battleship Potemkin, the Austrian Film Museum presents a near-complete retrospective.
I Know Where I’m Going!: In the Wind
In one of cinema’s greatest love stories, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger use the mercurial beauty of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides to evoke the unruly passions of an indelible heroine.
LA Critics and Globe Nominations
One Battle After Another carries on plowing through the season while Hollywood braces for “a seismic reorganization.”
Salaam Bombay!: A View from the Streets
In her Cannes-award-winning narrative feature debut, Mira Nair sees the lives of Indian street children with an unconditionally generous gaze, taking in their world in all its contradictions and complexity.
Encounters with Straub and Huillet and Costa
BAM presents These Encounters of Theirs on 35 mm, and Pedro Costa screens and discusses movies in Copenhagen.
The Past Is an Intruder
New issues of Cineaste and Found Footage Magazine are among this week’s highlights.
New York Critics and Indie Spirits
PTA wins one accolade after another, and Peter Hujar’s Day leads the nominations for the Film Independent Spirit Awards.
Present Past 2025
The Academy Museum celebrates film presentation with a series of twenty-four new restorations.
Gothams, BIFAs, and Top Tens
Even as he carries on winning awards, Jafar Panahi is sentenced to another year in prison.
Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray: Optical Dazzle
In a string of short films he made in the 1920s, Man Ray brought a restlessly inventive spirit to a young medium, pushing the boundaries of cinematic form with frenetic editing, abstract imagery, and surrealist camera tricks.
Tom Stoppard’s Deep-Hearted Puzzles
One of the most vital playwrights of our era was also an award-winning screenwriter.
From First Bloom to Resplendent Decay
This short week brings writing on Wong Kar Wai’s first series and Kubrick’s and Pasolini’s last features.
Eyes Wide Shut: A Sword in the Bed
Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, Stanley Kubrick’s final film is a deeply personal examination of the fragility of marriage and the destructive power of sexual fantasy.
The Unsettling Charisma of Udo Kier
Having broken through in over-the-top horror movies, Kier turned in arresting performances in films by Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, and Gus Van Sant.
November Books
This month brings new collections from Melissa Anderson and A. S. Hamrah and a whole shelf of lives lived with the movies.
Talkies
Look who’s talking: Sissy Spacek, Sylvia Chang, Ryan Coogler, Jean Renoir, and Roberto Rossellini.
Arthur Jafa and Besidedness
To complement his new exhibition, Jafa programs a series of four double bills.
Sentimental Value Leads the EFA Nominations
Joachim Trier’s family drama stars Stellan Skarsgård as a renowned film director and Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as his estranged daughters.
Abbas Kiarostami’s Early Shorts and Features: Poetic Solutions to Philosophical Problems
Though the first two decades of the Iranian filmmaker’s career have long been underappreciated, this fertile period yielded philosophical and restlessly innovative works that reinvigorated both documentary and narrative-fiction cinema.
Hell’s Angels: The Sky Is the Limit
A pre-Code aviation epic that makes pioneering use of the era’s innovations in cinematic color and sound, Howard Hughes’s directorial debut was Hollywood’s first modern portrait of World War I.
Él: Mad Love
This tale of paranoia and romantic jealousy slyly combines the conventions of popular Mexican filmmaking with the surrealist sensibility that made its director, Luis Buñuel, a legendary figure in his native Spain.
Early Mamoru Oshii
Ten years before Ghost in the Shell, the director made one of his most enigmatic and personal works.