Who was this giant of cinema, this at once diffident and arrogant workhorse of a filmmaker, Fassbinder? He was self-destructive, gay, antigay, versatile (he learned just about every trade associated with the cinema), he was terribly vexing and charming, all at once. Trying to pigeonhole him is a fool’s errand (he covered his trail, eluded categorizing). He dominated the melodramatic genre, in all its shades, from the

Among all the films at this year’s Tribeca festival, the most stunning one was “State Like Sleep,” a modern-day film noir with all the suspense of a Hitchcock movie.  The story, set in the underbelly of Brussels, follows the widow of a deceased Belgian actor who one-year after his death decides to investigate the mystery behind his apparent suicide. The film’s heroine, Katherine Waterston (“Alien: Covenant,” “Fantastic

Tribeca 2018 was truly the year for female filmmakers. With “Egg,” actress and director Marianne Palka (“Glow”) proves that she’s just as talented behind the camera as she is in front of it. Fresh off the success of writing and directing her dark comedy “Bitch" (2017) Palka takes on a more dialogue-driven relationship story. In “Egg,” two art school friends and their husbands meet for an afternoon in New York. While discussing

The Cannes Festival just announced this year's jury composition. The members are, Chang Chen (an actor from China), Ava DuVernay (writer, director, producer), filmmaker Robert Guédiguian (“The snows of Kilimandjaro”), Khadja Nin (a songwriter and composer from Burundi), actress Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, and Russian writer-director Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film “Loveless”

Those of us film lovers lucky enough to have known the cornucopia of the seventies and eighties remember that in the midst of films by great auteurs (who, for some, had started their career way earlier) Pasolini, Fellini, Scola, Bergman, Herzog, Wender, Fassbinder, Resnais, Rivette, Von Trotta, Wajda and so many others in an undending list of quasi geniuses, anything by the Taviani brothers was the promise of a miracle.

The Czech-born director Milos Forman, who twice won the Academy Award for Best Director for his films “One flew over the cuckoo's nest” (1975) and “Amadeus” (1984) died on Friday at his home in the United States at 86 after a protracted battle with illness. His widow, Martina, told the Czech news agency CTK, "he died peacefully, surrounded by his family and loved ones.” Forman was a politically-committed filmmaker

It'll be hard to deny it: the Cannes Festival doth Iranian cinema love. Asghar Farhadi's "Everybody knows," which stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, will open this 71st edition, in a long tradition of showing deference to Iranian cinema. Jafar Panahi, under house arrest in Tehran by order of Iran's judicial courts (he won the top prize at Berlinale for his "Tehran Taxi" in 2015), has a horse in this race, too: his film is called "Three faces."