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The lingering effect of a psychological thriller can be haunting when a script dissolves the sense of reality and manipulates viewers with its psychological narratives. Fear and anxiety drive psychological tension throughout the film as the principal characters’ distorted perceptions and fractured relationships unravel. Unlike traditional horror, the thrill in a psychological thriller is more internalized, making it a particularly haunting experience.

The psychological construct of narrative results from a unique historical shift inward – toward the secrets of the human mind. The human evolution from superstitions to science blurred the mysterious line between reality and imagination. That acts like a brain tease and makes you question almost everything around you. Hulu has a great assorted collection of such mind-bending, genre-jumping films with psychological narratives that will undoubtedly make your brain restless. I am trying to pick ten that worked for me and are highly underseen. Let me know your thoughts.

Pia Marais’ Transamazonia seeks to connect us to its characters and the environment containing them, but we leave the film far more imprinted by the latter. The fourth feature by the South African-born and -raised filmmaker, she aims to create an emotionally involving story, with rooting interests for sympathetic individual and collective groups––here, the indigenous Assurini people of Trocará, Brazil. But it’s really more effective as a mood piece, the thematic clash between empiricism and superstition emanating like gun smoke from the depths of its jungle setting.

Marais is esteemed on the festival circuit but has been less well-served for theatrical distribution; her 2007 feature The Unpolished, which won the top prize at Rotterdam, is one of the more underrated debuts of its decade. A tough and tender memoir of growing up with very bohemian parents, its highly personal look at a challenging, stimulating upbringing is echoed by Transamazonia’s own plot,...

Ingmar Bergman is the Oscar-winning Swedish auteur who helped bring international cinema into the American art houses with his stark, brooding dramas. But how many of his titles remain classics? Let’s take a look back at 25 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden, Bergman started off as a screenwriter before moving into directing. His early hits “Summer with Monika” (1953), “Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953) and “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955) helped make him a favorite amongst American audiences hungry for world cinema.

He hit his stride in 1957 with a pair of noteworthy titles: “Wild Strawberries” and “The Seventh Seal.” Both films dealt with the absence of God and the inevitability of mortality — the former concerning an aging professor (Victor Sjostrom) coming to terms with his life, the latter focusing on a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) playing a game of chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot...

They say that one person’s loss is another person’s gain, but cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt had mixed emotions about his recent good fortune in landing the coveted director of photography gig on “May December,” the latest film from Todd Haynes. The director is known for his Oscar-nominated collaborations with longtime colleague Ed Lachman, which include “Carol” and “Far from Heaven.” Lachman, however, suffered a broken hip after a fall while shooting Pablo Larraín’s “El Conde,” and Haynes needed a new set of eyes. So he turned to his filmmaker pal Kelly Reichardt for recommendations, and Blauvelt stepped aboard the darkly comic tale of a tenacious actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), infiltrating the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), a Mary Kay Letourneau-esque homemaker and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), who was 13 when they first got together.

“Kelly and Todd are teachers for me, I learned so much from them,...

Many cinematographers wouldn’t want to be mistaken with someone else, but Christopher Blauvelt was exceedingly unbothered when I revealed May December initially suggested Ed Lachman. It’s an easy mistake to make––Blauvelt is filling in for Lachman, Todd Haynes’ usual cinematographer, when personal injury prevented him from shooting the new feature––unless you know his work well enough, accordingly I remembered his involvement in the first exterior shots bearing the heavy grain that have made his collaborations with Kelly Reichardt so deeply felt, so elemental.

Blauvelt presented May December at this year’s EnergaCAMERIMAGE days before it opens in the United States and two weeks in advance of its Netflix debut. When we met at Toruń’s Hotel Copernicus my general list of questions got upended by conversational flow, resulting in an interview that covers much of the film’s making––including the next, revealing chapter in my...

Todd Haynes is the filmmaker “alive right now who is the most connected to the aesthetic and language of melodrama,” according to his longtime fan Ari Aster.

The day after the New York Film Festival’s September 29 opening night premiere of “May December,” Netflix hosted an Academy tastemaker screening of Haynes’ latest spell-casting melodrama starring Julianne Moore. Haynes couldn’t be joined by his cast, including Moore as a lispy suburban Mary Kay Letourneau type and Natalie Portman as a famous actress tasked with playing her in a movie, due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike. But the Oscar-nominated “Carol” and “Far From Heaven” director was joined by “Hereditary” and “Beau Is Afraid” director Aster at the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan for a post-screening Q&a. IndieWire shares the exclusive full Q&a video below.

“I love this film, and when I first saw it earlier this week, it really bothered me,...

Todd Haynes, who has appeared on behalf of his latest directing outing, May December, since its splashy debut in Cannes, turned to a new collaborator when promoting it at the New York Film Festival.

Samy Burch, writer and executive producer of the film (which is based on an original story developed by Burch and Alex Mechanik) had to skip Cannes and any subsequent activities for the film in recent months due to the WGA strike. Prior to the July walkout by SAG-AFTRA members, co-stars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman had joined Haynes on the stump.

But on Friday at the film’s NYFF opening press conference (its gala debut is tonight at Alice Tully Hall), Haynes cited the script often. Before long, it fully registered who was able to sit onstage to his immediate left thanks to this week’s end to the WGA strike.

“It will be so fun...

Exclusive: Zoë Kravitz (The Batman) has signed on to star in Biter, a new dark comedy based on the short story by Cat Person‘s Kristen Roupenian. Kravitz will also produce via her company This Is Important, with Paperclip Ltd and Winterlight Pictures co-producing.

Part of Roupenian’s debut short story collection You Know You Want This published in 2019, which Winterlight brought to Kravitz and Paperclip, “Biter” tells the story of a young woman who fantasizes about biting one of her co-workers.

Related Story Dwayne Johnson And Bob Iger Reveal Live-Action ‘Moana’ In Development Related Story True-Crime Book 'Ruxton: The First Modern Murder' In The Works As Limited Series & Podcast From Yeardley Smith's Paperclip Ltd Related Story John Hyams To Adapt David Drayer's Novella 'Attachment' For Paperclip

Kravitz comes to the project after wrapping production on her directorial debut Pussy Island — a thriller she co-wrote starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum,...

Brett Morgen’s kaleidoscopic ode to David Bowie landed at no 10 in North America this weekend, singing up 1.225 million on 170 screens – exclusively Imax.

The 7,207 PSA for the Neon distributed Moonage Daydream – expanding to about 600 screens next week — was the best of the ten, which all debuted on north of 2,000 screens.

Directed, written and produced by Morgen, Moonage is the number one music doc opening post pandemic, and the best opening for a post-Covid documentary on less than 200 screens, second only to Roadrunner (Focus Features), which went out on 900+ screens its opening weekend in April of 2021. Over the last 52 weeks, Searchlight Pictures’ The French Dispatch was the only film released on fewer than 200 screens to surpass a 1.2M gross, Neon noted. Morgen hosted nearly sold out Q&a’s opening weekend at the Tcl Chinese Theater in LA.

The doc took in 592k Fri./373k Sat.

“God’s Country” was reviewed by TheWrap out of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

“God’s Country” is the latest offering in a trend of reimagining both the Western and the thriller, as this film is also tagged, with Black leads. Thandiwe Newton, a 2018 Emmy winner for “Westworld,” stars as Sandra Guidry in an adaptation of James Lee Burke’s 1992 short story “Winter Light” about a college professor who gets into a battle of wills with two hunters who trespass on her property in Montana.

For filmmaker Julian Higgins, his feature-length debut is the second time around for the core story. Back in 2015, Higgins directed a successful short of the same name with, in keeping with the story, an older white male protagonist as lead. Obviously, a Black female star brings a different nuance to the narrative, but the real question may be whether Higgins and his story collaborator Shaye Ogbonna, a Black male writer,...

Thandiwe Newton in God’s Country Image: Courtesy of Gc Film, LLC The rolling hills and icy plains of God’s Country are equal parts bleak and beautiful. In Julian Higgins’ feature directorial debut, co-written with Shaye Ogbonna, the mountains that were “there before people” serve as a Rorschach test for its...

Thandiwe Newton ventures to the frosted depths of the forest in IFC Films’ “God’s Country,” inspired by James Lee Burke’s short story “Winter Light.” In the film, Newton portrays Sandra Guidry, a college professor living in a rural town while grieving the recent loss of her mother. On the day of the funeral, Sandra finds a mysterious truck parked in her driveway that belongs to hunters looking to hunt on her property. Sandra is soon drawn into a battle of escalating wills in the Western-set thriller.

“God’s Country” is directed Julian Higgins, who co-wrote the screenplay with Shay Ogbonna. Jeremy Bobb, Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White, Kai Lennox, and Tanaya Beatty also star. The film first at 2022 Sundance Film Festival, and is produced by Miranda Bailey, Halee Bernard, Julian Higgins, and Amanda Marshall. Executive producers include Jason Beck and Anthony Ciardelli.

Director Higgins said in a press statement that he...

IFC Films has acquired the North American rights to “God’s Country,” a thriller and modern-day Western starring Thandiwe Newton that premiered at this year’s Sundance.

Julian Higgins directed the film that stars Newton as a reclusive college professor living in a small, Western town who gets into an escalating battle of wills with two locals who insist upon parking their truck and trespassing onto her land.

IFC Films plans to release “God’s Country” theatrically in fall 2022.

“God’s Country” is based on a short story called “Winter Light” by author James Lee Burke. Higgins and writer Shaye Ogbonna first adapted the story as a short film before expanding it as a feature, but this time turning the character into a Black woman and expanding the part and character’s backstory significantly.

While the film has the trappings of a thriller and Western, it’s far more of an intimate, slow-burn...

A few thrillers have premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival that feature vulnerable and underestimated women, but none of them carry the quiet, enigmatic power of Thandiwe Newton in God’s Country, a frigid neo-western that moves glacially but thoughtfully through topics of class, race, and gender. As Sandra, a college professor living alone with her dog in the vast Montana wilderness, Newton exudes a gravitational force, carrying a stern and inscrutable countenance that her character will eventually use to her advantage in an ongoing dispute with two white men. In a pocket of the country that feels lawless and bitterly divided, Sandra is unafraid to begin a vindictive war of escalation, even if it means stripping away everything important in her life.

Directed by Julian Higgins, and based on James Lee Burke’s short story, “Winter Light,” God’s Country introduces Sandra cloaked in the aftermath of death. In the final weeks before Christmas,...

Thandiwe Newton, as she now spells her first name, finally gets a role she can really sink her teeth into with God’s Country, a disturbing, unusually class-and-race-conscious modern Western that paints a pretty despairing view of human relations in red state America. Methodically paced and dominated by negative emotions all around, director/co-writer Julian Higgins takes his own sweet time exploring the troubling, unfriendly mindsets on both sides of the fence. Fences, in fact, would have been a very apt title for this quietly simmering study of people who bring little but ill-will to the table.

Higgins must have a thing about academics and trespassing; his 2004 debut feature Mending Wall dealt with conflicts in a small New England town, while his 2015 short Winter Light (apologies to Ingmar Bergman) centered on a battle between a college professor and two hunters intruding on his property. In his new film, which is set in a mountainous,...

I’m a sucker for card-sharp movies, and I’m not alone. The allure of films like “The Cincinnati Kid” or “California Split” or “Rounders” is that the poker games have the quality of athletic showdowns: the kind of hand-to-hand, eyeball-to-eyeball aggression we associate with a contest taking place in a gladiatorial arena. But in a card movie, it’s all done sitting in chairs, with mental acuity (and fate!) as the only weapon. Great poker scenes, in their slyly civilized cards-close-to-the-vest way, formalize the desire to destroy your opponent, but they’re also layered with a drive to psych him out that most combat scenes don’t have. To me, the single greatest movie card sequence is the Texas hold ’em tournament at the center of “Casino Royale.” It’s a little movie unto itself, and the currents of strategy and malevolence and sheer nimble play that pass between...

While the majority of 2020’s film festivals opted for virtual or hybrid affairs — and some were even cancelled, as was the case for both Cannes and Telluride — this year sees the world creeping, quite cautiously, back into seeming normalcy. Cannes went off without a hitch (albeit in an un-traditional July slot), while both Venice and Telluride are gearing up for in-person editions in the coming days. The Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival are both going ahead with hybrid events that will likely offer less virtual options for audiences than they did last year, with NYFF even announcing that it would not screen any films on a virtual platform, though some other events will be available that way.

So, no, this year’s packed fall festival season doesn’t look quite the same as it did even two years ago, but 2021 promises to feel more like old times than 2020 ever did.

A young Parisian filmmaker whose delicately personal work illuminates the unbearable lightness of being with the soft touch of a late summer breeze, Mia Hansen-Løve may not be the first 21st-century auteur who comes to mind when people consider the portentous legacy of Ingmar Bergman, a man whose cinema stared into the void in the hopes of seeing its own reflection, and shouted down God’s silence with such howling rage that even his comedies are probably still echoing in eternity. From a distance, the idea of Hansen-Løve shooting an homage to Bergman feels like the equivalent of, say, Kacey Musgraves recording a covers album devoted to the Swedish doom metal band Candlemass.

And yet, “Bergman Island” — a triple-layered meta-romance about a filmmaker who flies to Sweden with her partner and pitches him a screenplay about her first love — is such . Set on the remote skerry in the Baltic Sea...

Buyers respond in France, Italy, Scandinavia, Latin America.

Illustrating the enduring readiness of independent theatrical buyers to step up for coveted packages with star attachments, Endeavor Content has concluded a raft of prestige international deals on noir tale The Actor with Ryan Gosling in the lead.

Following the recent North American deal with Neon, rights to the 1950’s-set story have gone in France (Metropolitan), Italy (Notorious), Scandinavia (Scanbox), Eastern Europe (Vertical Distribution), Cis (Capella Film), Middle East (Salim Ramia), Japan (Happinet Phantom Studios), and Latin America (Sun).

Endeavor Content launched sales on The Actor in early March at the virtual EFM,...

Abigail Spencer is set for a recurring role on Rebel, ABC’s new drama series starring Katey Sagal.

Created by Krista Vernoff inspired by the life of Erin Brockovich today, Rebel centers on Annie “Rebel” Bello (Sagal), a blue-collar legal advocate without a law degree. She’s a funny, messy, brilliant and fearless woman who cares desperately about the causes she fights for and the people she loves. When Rebel applies herself to a fight she believes in, she will win at almost any cost.

Spencer will play Misha, a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon who has a painful romantic history with Nate (Kevin Zegers) but can’t resist getting involved with studying the Stonemore heart valve for fear that she may have inadvertently harmed hundreds of patients. Spencer joins previously announced recurring stars Mary McDonnell, Dan Bucatinsky, Adam Arkin, MoMcRae and Daniella Garcia, among others.

The series hails from Davis Entertainment,...

Los Angeles based filmmaker Julian Higgins (a past Student Academy Award winner) began tinkering around with the long form of his current project with a 2015 short Winter Light – based on James Lee Burke’s short story. After a paying gig in television’s Guidance, this past February Higgins took to the epoque friendly backdrop of Montana for a neo-Western thriller starring Thandie Newton. God’s Country was recently included in Film Music and Sound Design Lab at the Sundance Institute.

Gist: Written by Shaye Ogbonna, Newton plays a grieving college professor living on her own at the edge of the national forest.…...

If you had to pluck one image from cinema to evoke the heady grandeur of the mid-20th-century art-film revolution, you couldn’t do better than Max von Sydow as the shimmering-coiffed, dourly ambivalent knight Antonius Block, playing chess with Death in “The Seventh Seal.”

Released in 1957, Ingmar Bergman’s film was a dark medieval mystery tour, fusing elemental drama with the thrill of “symbolism” to provide a new kind of charge for audiences. What remains remarkable about that fateful chess game is that though von Sydow was an unknown actor, he seemed nearly as stylized as Death himself. Toweringly tall, with a tapered thin smile, eyes that twinkled even when they were in pain, and hair that fell somewhere between Nordic blond and premature white (it’s as if the character’s travails were already aging him), von Sydow cut such a striking presence in “The Seventh Seal” that he appeared captivatingly real and,...

Stage and screen acting legend Max Von Sydow, who starred in The Seventh Seal and appeared in The Exorcist, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Flash Gordon, and Game of Thrones, died on March 8 at the age of 90, according to Variety.

“It is with a broken heart and with infinite sadness that we have the extreme pain of announcing the departure of Max von Sydow,” his wife, the producer Catherine Brelet, said in a statement.

Von Sydow made his Hollywood debut as Jesus in the 1965 Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. This gave him the authority to observe “if Jesus were alive today and saw what they are saying in his name, he would never stop throwing up” in Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters. Von Sydow had the power to compel Satan as Father Merrin in William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic The Exorcist and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), directed by John Boorman.

He faced down Death itself in “The Seventh Seal,” then the demon Pazuzu in “The Exorcist,” and finally Kylo Ren in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

Max von Sydow, whose death Sunday at age 90 was confirmed by Variety, did all of these things in a singular career that spanned the European arthouse to Hollywood blockbusters. Lanky and chisel-faced, he was the kind of actor who grabbed your attention immediately and held it. And his deep, resonant voice — so memorable as he’s mansplaining culture and history to Barbara Hershey in “Hannah and Her Sisters” — seemed like it really could have been capable of sending demons back to hell.

He was born April 10, 1929 in Lund, Sweden, and began his career as an actor in several films by Alf Sjöberg, an early collaborator of Ingmar Bergman, before moving to Malmö and working with Bergman himself — first on stage at the Municipal Theatre,...

Max von Sydow, the tall, tragic-faced Swedish actor whose name was virtually synonymous with the films of Ingmar Bergman, has died. He was 90.

Variety has confirmed that the actor died on Sunday.

Von Sydow, who became Bergman’s symbol for the modern man in such films as “The Passion of Anna” and “Shame” after making his Bergman debut as the errant knight in “The Seventh Seal,” also had an unusually prolific career in Hollywood and international films.

He made his American debut in the role of Jesus Christ in George Stevens’ turgid 1965 epic “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and went on to make strong impressions with audiences in “The Exorcist,” Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” David Lynch’s “Dune,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “Hawaii,” “Conan the Barbarian” and “Awakenings.”

Von Sydow worked for other Scandinavian directors as well, drawing an Oscar nomination for his role in Bille August...

Exclusive: Westworld Emmy winning actress Thandie Newton will headline Julian Higgins’ feature directorial debut God’s Country for Cold Iron Pictures and The Film Arcade, Deadline has learned.

The neo-Western thriller is set in the bleak winter landscape of the Mountain West. Newton plays a college professor living on her own at the edge of the national forest. One day she confronts two hunters trespassing on her land, triggering a battle of wills with dangerous ramifications.

Screenwriter Shaye Ogbonna adapted the script with Higgins from James Lee Burke’s short story Winter Light. Burke is The New York Times bestselling author of the Dave Robicheaux detective series and numerous other novels. He has received two Edgar Awards and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Burke’s 40th novel will be released this year.

Criterion re-releases restorations of three Ingmar Bergman titles with A Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman, the collection’s first presentation of the Swedish auteurs works originally released on DVD in 2003. Sixteen years later, Criterion has released one of the most comprehensive collections of his filmography last fall and continues to restore its stand alone offerings. While the triptych of Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963) are collectively known as his Silence of God Trilogy, the collection foregoes the direct religious reference in its packaging.…...

Ingmar Bergman would’ve celebrated his 101st birthday on July 14, 2019. The Oscar-winning Swedish auteur helped bring international cinema into the American art houses with his stark, brooding dramas. But how many of his titles remain classics? In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 25 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden, Bergman started off as a screenwriter before moving into directing. His early hits “Summer with Monika” (1953), “Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953) and “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955) helped make him a favorite amongst American audiences hungry for world cinema.

SEEOscar Best Director Gallery: Every Winner In Academy Award History

He hit his stride in 1957 with a pair of noteworthy titles: “Wild Strawberries” and “The Seventh Seal.” Both films dealt with the absence of God and the inevitability of mortality — the former concerning an aging professor (Victor Sjostrom) coming to terms with his life,...

Olivier Assayas and Juliette Binoche deliver a very contemporary comedy about modern life and twitter. The characters all freely unload their opinions of our technical computer-driven age, life on the internet and how twitter, facebook, and texting obsess and drive our daily lives. Dramatically unrelenting observations of these (very interesting!) themes.

To say the least it is thought provoking and, as done here, very funny.

Endlessly talky, the film works for me as the characters’ — modern Parisians all — speculate on how the new and endlessly changing internet age has affected their lives. Thought provoking because the talk is brainy and challenging.

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet reunite with seasoned director Olivier Assayas for this dialogue heavy, slyly seductive tale. And the internet.

Set in the world of the latter day bohemian intelligentsia of the Parisian publishing world, Non-Fiction traces the romantic and emotional fallout that results when a controversial writer...

In good news for fans of Ingmar Bergman and Bruno Dumont, the Criterion Collection has announced its June titles. Three from the Swedish master are making the upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray, with Dumont’s “La vie de Jésus” and “L’humanité” making their Criterion debut. Also joining the collection are John Cameron Mitchell’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” George Stevens’ “Swing Time,” and Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic adaptation of “War and Peace.”

More information below, as well as the ever-alluring cover art:

A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman

In 1960, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman began work on three of his most powerful and representative films, eventually recognized as a trilogy. Already a figure of international acclaim for such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal and The Magician, Bergman turned his back on the expressionism of his fifties work to focus on a series of chamber dramas exploring belief and alienation in the modern age.

In the category of culture-driven documentaries that focus on film history, a particularly enjoyable subset of that subset is the kind made by noteworthy artists themselves. There’s Martin Scorsese waxing luxuriously on Italian cinema (“My Voyage to Italy”), Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow fanboy-interviewing Brian DePalma for “DePalma,” and now, German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta (“Hannah Arendt”) taking us on a personal tour of her lifelong admiration for Sweden’s hallowed grandmaster in the playfully inquisitive “Searching for Ingmar Bergman.”

Von Trotta’s connection to Bergman started when she was a young, New Wave-enamored film lover who responded deeply to his 1957 chess-with-Death masterpiece “The Seventh Seal”; she even opens her valentine of a documentary visiting its famed rocky beach setting, narrating the impact of its establishing shots.

When she blossomed as an artist herself as part of West Germany’s own exciting crush of post-war filmmaking talent alongside...

Margarethe von Trotta on Olivier Assayas, Stig Björkman and Ingmar Bergman: "They went in 1990 for five days to Stockholm to make a big interview with Bergman for Cahiers du Cinéma ..." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second half of my conversation on Searching For Ingmar Bergman with Margarethe von Trotta, we discuss Daniel Bergman and his father, Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage, Winter Light and Ingrid Thulin, Ruben Östlund filming Margarethe, Jean-Claude Carrière, Fanny and Alexander, Cries And Whispers, Marianne & Juliane.

The connections to Olivier Assayas and the supernatural in Personal Shopper (see the impressive Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York), Stig Björkman, Wild Strawberries and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma appeared.

Liv Ullmann with Margarethe von Trotta in Searching For Ingmar Bergman

Margarethe von Trotta has had a remarkable career working with her longtime cinematographer Franz Rath...

Margarethe von Trotta with Anne-Katrin Titze, on Ingmar Bergman: "He wanted to be the child all the time. Even when he was grown up." Photo: Gary Springer

On Columbus Day, following An Afternoon with Barry Jenkins (director of Oscar-winning Moonlight and the adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk), a discussion led by Darryl Pinckney at Alice Tully Hall during the 56th New York Film Festival, Margarethe von Trotta joined me for a conversation on Searching For Ingmar Bergman.

In the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center green room, we discussed the interviews she conducted with Stig Björkman, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, Jean-Claude Carrière, Daniel Bergman, and Gaby Dohm. She also shared her thoughts on The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, Fanny and Alexander, The Serpent's Egg, From the Life of the Marionettes, the persona of Ingmar Bergman, a Rainer Werner Fassbinder connection, Eta Hoffmann, and the hour of the wolf.

Who needs a middle man’s subjectivity when you have algorithms predicting what people will like? Critics don’t matter much in Olivier Assayas’ talkative Non-Fiction, but they are not the only supposedly anachronistic relic to be thrown out of the window in this gentle and profoundly compassionate human comedy that draws from the ever-widening rift between old and new trends in the publishing industry to conjure up a tale of societal changes–and people caught in between them.

Nurturing a collaboration that fathered prior gems such as Summer Hours (2008) and the more recent Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Non-Fiction adds another entry to the list of Assayas–Binoche duets, with the French muse still starring as an actress–albeit downgraded from the Clouds’ arthouse charmer to policewoman in a TV series of dubious quality. But Juliette Binoche no longer serves as the plot’s gravitating center, sharing the spotlight with...

When the series finale of “Adventure Time” airs on Cartoon Network next Monday, it will bring to a close ten seasons of one of the network’s most inventive and flat-out endearing endeavors. Ostensibly an adventure story (of course) about a boy and his dog, the series quickly expanded out to chronicle the going-on in the mystical, magical Land of Ooo. And oh (ooo?), what adventures there were to be had, and while they may be over for now, there’s plenty of good stuff to look back on in the days to come.

In short, it will keep you warm — as will a key element of a fresh look at the making of an episode of the show.

Curious about how an episode of the series comes together? In a behind the scenes animatic clip, the early stages of the “Winter Light” episode of the “Elements” mini-series is brought to life,...

Any passing visitor who’s toiled amongst the weeds of Ingmar Bergman’s vast garden of emotional entanglements will surely recognize the same familiar seeds of chaos, conflict, and spiritual carnage sown between the damned pistel and stamen of whichever variety of lovers feature into a particular film – but in Shame (1968), his scabbed and battered masterwork of wartime wreckage, the Swedish auteur lays fire to the roses. Incendiary combat between dueling psyches in intimate locations fuels much of his filmography – the mother-daughter melee of Autumn Sonata and frosty schoolhouse rejection in Winter Light immediately jump to mind – but Shame ignites a maximalist fuse within its scope that quite literally drops a bomb on the long-suffering couple at the broken heart of its story. By contrasting the domestic drama of Eva and Jan Rosenberg’s (Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow) decomposing marriage against a backdrop of military destruction and societal decay,...

Tomorrow is the centenary of the birth of one of cinema’s greatest directors, Ingmar Bergman, and to celebrate, The Criterion Collection has announced of their most expansive releases ever. This November, they will release Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, a 39-film box set comprising nearly all of his work, including 18 films never before released by Criterion. Curated akin to a film festival, the set features Opening, Centerpiece, and Closing Films, with many double features in between. The set also features 11 introductions and over five hours of interviews with the director himself, six making-of documentaries, a 248-page book, and much more.

As we await for its November 20 release, check out an overview from Criterion below, as well as the box art, the trailer, and the full list of films, in curated order. One can also see much more about each release and the special features on the official site.

With the...

Hawke plays a priest tormented by cancer, alcohol and traumatic memories in Schrader’s ferocious drama

Paul Schrader’s powerful new drama First Reformed is Shaker furniture in movie form – stark, plain, conceived in austere and intelligent good taste; beautifully made, in fact, but maybe more designed for looking at than actually sitting on. It is about a man of God and his personal spiritual ordeal, building inexorably to an apocalyptic climax. Schrader has spoken of being inspired by Pawel Pawłikowski’s Oscar-winning film Ida, but for me it was more as if Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light had been remade with Travis Bickle in the leading role.

The resemblances here to Schrader’s script for Scorsese’s 1976 classic Taxi Driver are surely deliberate. There is an unforgettably grisly moment when the tormented priest, harrowed by stomach cancer and alcoholism, pours a slug of shocking pink Pepto-Bismol into his whisky...

Team Experience will be celebrating one of the world's most acclaimed auteurs for the next week for the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth. Here's Sean Donovan...

Perhaps none of Ingmar Bergman’s films do more to conjure clichés of what a ‘Bergman film’ is than 1963’s Winter Light. While Persona is undoubtedly the cinephile consensus choice for his best film, and The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries are his most widely-seen, frequently adorning college syllabi about the history of European cinema, the morose sadness for which his work became known feels most exemplarily expressed in Winter Light. The second part of a trilogy about “the silence of God” (starting out grim already), Winter Light’s infinite quiet, stark black-and-white cinematography, freezing cold exteriors, and tear-soaked monologues scream Bergman in capital letters. It’s strange viewing with which to start a hot summer weekday morning, but here we are.

Film critic Dave Kehr is now a curator in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art, but in 2011 he published a reviews collection, “When Movies Mattered.” It mostly covered movies of the ’70s and ’80s, years that saw film and criticism elevated to more serious consideration. I have been thinking of his book with A24’s release of Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed.” Now in its third weekend, it’s passed the $1 million mark in just 91 theaters.

That’s promising, but it’s not the gross that interests me most. What’s compelling is the combination of critical attention and theatrical response, which represents a victory for the increasingly endangered world of specialized film.

Here’s are are some reasons why the film could mean so much more than a modest box-office success.

It doesn’t fit the mold of what gets made, or what gets audience attention.

The writer-director Paul Schrader has gotten some of the most ecstatic reviews of his career for “First Reformed,” and though I’m not in the rapturous/masterpiece camp about it, I agree with the praise more than not. The movie, which stars Ethan Hawke as an upstate New York minister who is undergoing a crisis of faith/health/isolation/midlife woe, is an austerely unabashed and compelling oddball, a pastiche of “Diary of a Country Priest” and “Winter Light” and what you might call the Schrader Paradigm, the one derived from “The Searchers” that he used (and made iconic) in his screenplay for “Taxi Driver,” and then in “Hardcore” and “Light Sleeper”: the loner who goes down a blood trail of redemption, trying to rescue a ravaged maiden who was taken by the forces of sin but remains, in his mind, unspoiled.

That said, there’s an additional component to “First Reformed” that,...

There are powerhouse movies that knock you for a loop and take weeks to recover from – and then there is Paul Schrader's First Reformed. Not only is this faith-in-crisis drama one of the legendary writer-director's most incendiary films ever, it's one of the year's very best – a cinematic whirlwind that leaves you both exhilarated and spent. Like the screenplays he wrote for Martin Scorsese (notably Taxi Driver) and the tormented works he's made about the wages of sin (Hardcore, American Gigolo, The Comfort of Strangers, Auto Focus), Schrader – raised...

Premiering on last year’s fall film festival circuit, Paul Schrader’s dark, existential spiritual drama First Reformed is one of the director’s best films–perhaps the best–and, in great news, you’ll be able to see it sooner than expected. Picked up by A24 and initially pegged for a late June release, they’re moving it up to May 18 and now the first trailer has arrived.

Led by Ethan Hawke, he plays a reverend with a drinking problem in upstate New York whose church is preparing for a 250th anniversary celebration. When the pregnant wife (Amanda Seyfried) of a disturbed man comes for him to help, questions of his spiritual path and the world at large come crashing down in wholly unexpected ways. Of course, it feels like a follow-up to Taxi Driver in some light for Schrader, but it’s also its own clear-eyed beast.

“It...

The late Ingmar Bergman brought an unprecedented force of philosophical clarity to cinema. From The Seventh Seal to Wild Strawberries to Persona, he crafted some of the most fascinating and seminal work — not just out of Sweden, but the world of film at large. The feature that has stuck with me the most from him, The Hour of the Wolf, is a haunting, hallucinatory journey that is completely mesmerizing and utterly unshakeable. Bergman could apply dream logic to scenarios in the most unexpected and terrifying ways, blending them with “real” moments until you questioned which was which. His films have a towering presence and energy, and his visual vocabulary stands as a testament to the power of images — singular in their capacity as conduits of ideas, emotions, and story.

Ingmar Bergman Makes A Movie is a 1963 documentary, featuring two-and-a-half hours of footage from pre- to post-production of Bergman’s Winter Light.

Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director considered one of the most influential and acclaimed filmmakers of modern cinema, died at his home in Faro, Sweden, on Monday; he was 89. The death was announced by the Swedish news agency TT and confirmed by Bergman's daughter, Eva, and Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, though an official cause of death was not yet given. Nominated for nine Academy Awards throughout his career and honored with the Irving G. Thalberg award in 1971, Bergman was cited as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, with his bleak, unsparing yet highly emotional explorations of the human psyche and its relation to life, sex, and death, in both highly symbolic and intensely personal films; he most notably influenced Woody Allen, who considered him the greatest of filmmakers. His images ranged from the stark black-and-white of films like The Seventh Seal to those awash in dreadful reds such as Cries and Whispers and the holiday warmth of Fanny and Alexander, his last film for the cinema. Born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1918, Bergman was the son of a Lutheran minister, and religious imagery as well as the tumultuous relationship between his parents would pervade his work. Though growing up in an extremely strict and devout family, Bergman lost his faith at an early age and grappled with the concept of the existence of God in many of his early films. Bergman discovered the magic of imagery at the age of nine with a magic lantern, for which he would create his own characters and scenery, and this love of light and images brought him to the theater world after a brief stint at the University of Stockholm. Bergman worked in both theater and film throughout the 1940s, as part of the script department of Svensk Filmindustri and as a director and producer for numerous small theater companies. His first script to be produced was the 1944 film Torment, and began as a director with small movies that allowed him to hone his craft; among his notable earlier works were Prison, Summer Interlude, and Sawdust and Tinsel.

Bergman came to the fore of the international cinematic community with the 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, his classic melancholy comedy about the romantic entanglements of three 19th century couples during a weekend at a country estate. The film propelled him to stardom and won him a a Cannes Film Festival award for "Best Poetic Humor" (it was also later adapted by Stephen Sondheim into the musical A Little Night Music). He established his legacy and reputation with his next two films: The Seventh Seal, featuring the now-iconic imagery of Death playing chess with a tortured medieval knight (Max Von Sydow), and Wild Strawberries, the study of an aged professor (played by Victor Sjostrom) revisiting his youth and his darkest fears as he drives through the Swedish countryside. Both films were phenomenal critical and box office successes, with Wild Strawberries earning Bergman his first Oscar nomination, for Best Screenplay. Bergman's The Virgin Spring, the grim fable about two parents exacting revenge on their daughter's murderers, won the Best Foreign Language film Oscar in 1961. He followed up that film with a trilogy of films -- Through a Glass Darkly (another Foreign Language Film Oscar winner), Winter Light and The Silence -- in which he grappled most powerfully with his lack of faith and belief in the power of love.

Making as many failures as he did successes, Bergman found favor with a number of films throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including the now-famous Persona, Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers (a nominee for Best Picture), Scenes from a Marriage, The Magic Flute, and Autumn Sonata. Throughout his films he used an ensemble of actors, most notably Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman, with whom he had a personal relationship and a child. He also almost always worked with the legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who won two Oscars for Cries and Whispers and 1982's Fanny and Alexander. It was that latter film that Bergman declared to be his final cinematic work, an intimate portrait of brother and sister set in early 20th century Sweden that was originally conceived as a four part TV film, and was released in the US at a truncated 188 minutes. It won four Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film. Though he officially "retired" from the film industry after Fanny and Alexander, Bergman made films for Swedish television, continued to direct theatrically (including a version of Hamlet in Swedish that traveled to the US) and wrote screenplays that were filmed by other directors, including Bille August, Bergman's son Daniel, and actress and former lover Liv Ullman. His last work as director was Saraband, a revisitation of the two lead characters (Ullman and Jospehson) from Scenes from a Marriage. Bergman was married five times, and his fifth wife, Ingrid von Rosen, passed away in 1995. He is survived by nine children from his past marriages and relationships. At press time, a funeral date had not yet been set. --Mark Englehart, IMDb staff...