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Articles by Imogen Smith
New York on Film, Noirvember Edition: ‘The Naked City’
November is “Noirvember,” a month-long celebration of the gritty film noir genre. And we’re getting in the game at Alamo Drafthouse (28 Liberty) on November 19 with a screening of Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City” (1948). Produced by Mark Hellinger, this landmark police procedural was filmed almost entirely on location, across more than 100 sites throughout New York City. A groundbreaking achievement in cinematic realism, the film helped redefine how New York City could be portrayed on screen.
Encapsulation of Porphyrins in Polymer Microgels and Microbeads for Heterogeneous Photooxidation
1 Introduction Photochemistry is the fundamental driving force for life on Earth, powering everything from the global food supply to physiological processes. In these photochemical processes, certain key molecules act as catalysts, enabling very high reaction efficiencies. These molecules are natural photocatalysts, such as chlorophyl, widely found in plants [1]. Chlorophyl consists of a porphyrin ring with a Mg2+ ion at its core and a long hydrocarbon tail.
Resident Evil: Zach Cregger’s thrilling reboot pares things back to the essentials of survival horror
The horror auteur has put his own satisfying spin on the Resident Evil movies by largely jettisoning franchise lore for a standalone zombie thriller that captures the maddening experience of playing the games. 22 September 2026 Andrea Miltner and Austin Abrams in Resident Evil (2026) Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment Video game adaptations have often struggled to walk the tightrope in forging a distinct identity.
Salvation: well-crafted debut offers a glimpse into the manosphere
Reviewed from the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival The synopsis of Salvation sounds timely, if also a mite too tidy: an aspiring life coach pushing manospheric platitudes watches helplessly as his own existence spirals out of control. Straw men burn easily, thankfully, and Scottish director Tom Nicoll’s debut feature has more on its mind than paging Dr. Schadenfreude.
The Julia Set: Chase Infiniti levels up a college romance coming-of-ager
There’s no doubt Chase Infiniti is star, but Niki Byrne’s debut feature, which features the actress as a gifted young mathematician, is too bogged down in exposition to really let her shine. 21 September 2026 Chase Infiniti as Julia in The Julia Set (2026) Courtesy of Toronto International Film Festival Reviewed from the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival Call it One Equation After Another.
Family Business: Paper Tiger
Feature With breath-holding, nails-in-palms suspense, James Gray’s latest explores how far we go to protect our loved ones Paper Tiger opens with a panoramic view across wetlands to the skyline of Manhattan, anchored by the Twin Towers. It is a serene image, the green and brown sea of phragmites rippling gently beneath an overcast sky—though when the film returns to this spot, near the end of the story, the scene is anything but peaceful.
Woman Unknown: May el-Toukhy’s elegant postwar drama has little beneath its surface tension
Mathilde Arcel gives a committed performance as a Danish housemaid haunted by a secret that threatens her new life, but el-Toukhy’s Golden Lion-winner fails to give its (anti)heroine a personality beyond her predicament. 17 September 2026 Mathilde Arcel as Marie in Woman Unknown (2026) Courtesy of Venice Film Festival Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival The striking seriousness of May el-Toukhy’s Venice Golden Lion winner Woman Unknown is announced from the very first frame.
Remake: A heartbreaking exploration of the slippage between documentary and fiction
Remake opens with a sprightly hand-drawn animation of a squid leaping out of the ocean, dolphin-like, in front of a palm-crested island. Near the end of the film, we discover it is from a flip-book drawn by the filmmaker Ross McElwee’s son Adrian as a child. The simple cartoon takes us back to the roots of cinema in the discovery of how still images can be animated – literally, made alive.
Locarno 2026: Life During Wartime
“The instinct for life expresses itself in strange ways,” the Palestinian director Mohanad Yaqubi says, quoting the late Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab on how people survive amid the unfathomable destruction of modern urban warfare.
Nice Work If You Can Get It: Office Romances on Film
Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female typists.
The Spirit of the Place
Festival Dispatch Pixel visions: Dry Leaf, Rose of Nevada, and Levers present us with surfaces so textured and tactile that they have the physicality of a terrain Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, 2025) A film can resemble a window through which we look into a world. But some films present us with surfaces so textured and tactile that they have the physicality of a terrain.
Kinuyo Tanaka Directs: Married to Cinema
Essays— Apr 28, 2026 As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw that leading roles were slipping away from her and faced predictably sexist criticism over her age.
Far from Home: Three Noirs by Jacques Tourneur
During the evening rush on a busy Los Angeles boulevard, a man steps into a news-vendor’s stall and scans the out-of-town papers section, where journals offer balm for homesick travelers and transplants. But his hometown, Evanston, Illinois, is missing—no call for it, the vendor says dismissively, before switching on the lights against the deepening dusk. The stranger flinches in the sudden glare, his reaction underscored by a sharp plink of strings on the soundtrack.
I Know Where I’m Going!: In the Wind
The romance of islands lies in the effort it takes to reach them, their distance from the mundane mainland. Listen to the thrill in the voice of a woman setting off on a night journey, when her father asks how far she is going. To Glasgow? “Further—the Western Isles!” She has never been there, but she has seen it, in her dreams.
Dancing in the Ruins: On “The Razor’s Edge”
Illustrations by Niklas Wesner. This is the first in a series of short essays considering notable film restorations of the last year. The Razor’s Edge (Jocelyne Saab, 1985). The Razor’s Edge (Ghazl el-banat, 1985) opens in a city of the dead, the camera panning slowly across a graveyard crowded with markers. But the film is about a city of the living—people living with death, in a place where destruction is as ordinary and inescapable as the weather.
The Spirit of the Place
This article appeared in the September 30, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, 2025) A film can resemble a window through which we look into a world. But some films present us with surfaces so textured and tactile that they have the physicality of a terrain.
“A Fragile Film Utopia”: Talking with Ehsan Khoshbakht
Nothing proves the power of art better than the lengths to which political and religious authorities will go in trying to control it—efforts that will always be counterproductive, since nothing spurs passion like the hunt for the scarce or forbidden. In his documentary Celluloid Underground (2023), film curator, filmmaker, and writer Ehsan Khoshbakht tells the story of growing up in postrevolutionary Iran, where the government heavily censored movies and banned private film ownership.
Eclipse Is Back!
If you’re like me, you loved Criterion’s Eclipse line because it brought you rare gems you’d been searching for and introduced you to films you didn’t know—including some by your favorite filmmakers. Criterion is relaunching Eclipse this November, as a Blu-ray line, and I’m thrilled to announce that I will be the series editor.
Dangerous Work: Cy Endfield, Film Noir, and the Blacklist
When Tom comes to work at Hawletts, a company that employs drivers to haul gravel over short distances, we learn exactly how many shillings they earn per load and how many loads they are expected to complete in a day. We get to know the roads, the machines, the sounds and textures of this world—you can all but smell the grit and asphalt and petrol, the grease in the “pull-in” where the drivers all eat. “There have been a lot of dramas on the rarified psychological plane,” Endfield said.
The Uninvited review: a Hollywood Hills psychodrama
Celebrity resentments and insecurities are portrayed with unusual tenderness in this clever Hollywood Hills satire featuring Elizabeth Reaser, Walton Goggins, and Pedro Pascal. 6 May 2025 Nadia Conners’ The Uninvited is a Hollywood Hills psychodrama; its caustic, quippy vision of flawed showbiz professionals stumbling through a dark night of the soul sits at the intersection of The Player (1992) and Sunset Blvd. (1950).
Thunderbolts* review: rooting for the antiheroes
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has drifted since Avengers Endgame (2019), which tied up plotlines developed over a decade. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) – one of the series’ biggest hits – jokes about the underperformance of subsequent MCU projects. Proposed replacements for major characters like Captain America and Black Panther haven’t exactly been embraced. Marvel Comics had a similar wobble in the 1990s, when they launched the instantly-dated ‘Heroes Reborn’ reboot.
Caught by the Tides second look review
Zhao Tao embodies modern alienation as Qiao Qiao, an enigmatic figure drifting through time and space in contemporary China. 1 May 2025 Certain actors hold our attention simply by the way they move through space. Zhao Tao never speaks in Caught by the Tides (2024), the latest film in her longrunning collaboration with her husband, the director Jia Zhangke.
Fatty + Buster: The Comique World of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton
Good Night, Nurse (1918), The Cook (1918), and The Garage (1919) Three shorts directed by and starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle with featured player Buster Keaton One of the most consequential chance meetings in cinema history occurred on a rainy day in March 1917 in New York City. Or so goes the story Buster Keaton often told about walking down Broadway and bumping into an old friend, Lou Anger, who introduced his companion, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
Winchester ’73: Under the Gun
Essays— Jan 28, 2025 In 1873, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company released a new model of rifle it marketed as “The Gun That Won the West.” That same year, in California, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge first successfully captured a high-speed exposure of a galloping horse.
NY on Film Screening: “The Apartment,” With Molly Haskell and Imogen Sara Smith
Step back into the world of 1960s Manhattan at the Downtown Alliance’s latest installation of New York on Film! Join us at Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan (28 Liberty St.) on December 3 for a special screening of Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” followed by a thought-provoking discussion with distinguished film critics Molly Haskell and Imogen Sara Smith.
Scarface: Gangster Style
Essays— Nov 12, 2024 Between brisk jolts of brutality comes one of the most charming scenes in Scarface (1932). Bookended by a shot of a body being hurled from a moving car and one of a gangster gleefully unpacking a crate full of tommy guns, the interlude shows rising thug Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) receiving a visit from his boss’s mistress, Poppy (Karen Morley).
Love’s Labors
This article appeared in the October 16, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Compensation (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1999) The past is full of surprises.
Writing Women in the 1930s
When Red-Headed Woman (1932) had its first preview in Glendale, the film’s creators were dismayed by the lack of laughs. Audiences weren’t sure what to make of the heroine, a brassy gold digger who relentlessly pursues her married boss. Should they be shocked or amused by her shameless exploits?
Unforgotten Ancestors: Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024
The first time I saw Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927) was on a boxy old television via a VHS tape. Even then, the extravagance of Gance’s ambition to put on-screen the surging tides of history and the flicker of thought in a human eye, all through what the director called “the music of light,” set a high-water mark for my idea of what cinema can be.
Between the Notes
This article appeared in the July 12, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Music (Angela Schanelec, 2023) “The hand can lie less than the face.” This was director Angela Schanelec’s response to an audience member who asked about her apparent obsession with filming hands after a screening of her new feature, Music, at last fall’s New York Film Festival.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Powell Before Pressburger
Michael Powell knew where he was going. From the first day he set foot in a movie studio at nineteen and was put to work sweeping the floor, he had no doubts about his life’s purpose. “I just knew I was a director, and couldn’t understand why people didn’t stand in line to offer me a film,” Powell wrote of his presumptuous younger self.
The Shimano Gravel Muster
Earlier this year Australian event promoters Rapid Ascent announced a new race in an ancient place; the Shimano Gravel Muster. As long-time hosts of the popular mountain bike stage race in Alice Springs known as The Redback, the event crew decided to bring their expertise in events to something new for Australia – a multi-day gravel race.
Great Adaptations: Columbia in the 1950s
Of all the major Hollywood studios, Columbia may be the hardest to pigeonhole. Paramount evokes continental sophistication and Warner Bros. is synonymous with tough, ripped-from-the-headlines urban drama, but Columbia resists easy labels. In part, this is because the studio relied less on contract stars and directors and more on borrowed talent and short-term deals.
Reviews - Reverse Shot
Into the Woods By Imogen Sara Smith Evil Does Not Exist Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan, Sideshow/Janus Films In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, the forest is both a 21st-century threatened ecosystem and a fairy-tale wood steeped in mystery and dark magic. What starts out as an environmental parable, pitting respectful efforts to live in balance with nature against shortsighted corporate greed, turns into something far stranger and more disquieting.
Discovering Hiroshi Shimizu
Passing Through: Discovering Hiroshi Shimizu By Imogen Sara Smith Museum of the Moving Image presents Hiroshi Shimizu Part I: The Shochiku Years May 4–19, 2024. The traveling shot is at the heart of Hiroshi Shimizu’s cinema. His camera glides alongside people as they walk, or tracks backward as they advance down a road. Scenes unspool at the pace of strollers and pilgrims, chatting pairs of women, itinerant workers on their way to the next job.
Muller, Eddie, Smith, Imogen Sara, Kronenberg, Michael: 9798324464066: Amazon.com: Books
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Dream Home: "Man’s Castle" Restored
“When you’re dead, you get a hunk of earth. When you’re alive, all you’ve got is that hunk of blue.” This is how Bill (Spencer Tracy), the restless hero of Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933), explains his insistence on sleeping under the open sky. Borzage’s films always cast their eyes heavenward with exalted sincerity; they offer no sop to modern irony or cynicism. No one should watch them who is not prepared to be enraptured.
TESTED: Skratch rice cakes and high carb mix
The folks at Skratch, led by Dr Allen Lim, are known for having turned cycling nutrition on its head a decade or so ago when they introduced real food alternatives and – wait for it – rice (!) to the deeply traditional road racing scene. Over the years, the business has proved it has incredible staying power in the fickle and flooded sports nutrition market, with appeal across all kinds of endurance activities – and that of course includes mountain biking.
Riding Singletrack 6 in Canada
Photos: John Gibson and Jean McAllister Bears, bears, bears. It’s hard to concentrate on the trail when all you can think about is grizzlies. Will I see it coming? What’s it feel like to have your face bitten off? Probably should have bought that bear spray. It’s the day before Singletrack 6 kicks off in the Canadian Rockies, and I’m in Fernie. The town isn’t a whole lot more than a strip of traffic lights, restaurants and gas stations on a highway through a narrow valley.
Cinema Revolutionary: Fernando de Fuentes in Morelia
The films of Fernando de Fuentes find beauty in crowds. Rivers of people flow across the screen: soldiers wearily slogging along dusty roads or villagers parading euphorically behind the victor of a horse race. His camera loves to mingle among the celebrants at fiestas, wedding feasts, or even dull cocktail parties; it loves to track through big groups, scanning tableaux of faces and bodies.
The Roaring Twenties: Into the Past
The New York City of Raoul Walsh’s childhood was a place where giants walked the earth—and came to dinner. In his riotously unreliable 1974 autobiography, Each Man in His Time, the director recalls his father, Thomas Walsh, as an Irish subversive who shot his way out of Dublin, escaping on a ship bound for Spain and ending up in New York as a cutter for Brooks Brothers, where he dressed Edwin Booth for Hamlet and Teddy Roosevelt for San Juan Hill.
Don’t Fence Her In: On Women of the West
A tight-lipped stranger arrives in a gold-mining town. After checking into a hotel, he heads to Charlie’s Saloon, one of those gambling palaces with glittering chandeliers and be-feathered hostesses. He is told that Charlie “runs the town” and “owns a piece of everything, including the undertaker and the sheriff.” The next day, after making himself an instant celebrity by besting the town’s toughest man in an epic fistfight, the stranger is summoned by the big boss.
Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons: Another Year
Waves dancing in the wake of a ferry, the tide receding on a rocky beach, a tree-lined canal glimpsed from a speeding car, fountains splashing in sleepy courtyards. Each of the films in Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons cycle opens with a prelude that drops us with fresh immediacy into a place, and into a flow of time that carries us along like a leaf on a stream.
Don’t Fence Her In: On Women of the West
A tight-lipped stranger arrives in a gold-mining town. After checking into a hotel, he heads to Charlie’s Saloon, one of those gambling palaces with glittering chandeliers and be-feathered hostesses. He is told that Charlie “runs the town” and “owns a piece of everything, including the undertaker and the sheriff.” The next day, after making himself an instant celebrity by besting the town’s toughest man in an epic fistfight, the stranger is summoned by the big boss.
All about riding the Breck Epic
Photos: Eddie Clark The Breck Epic has deep roots in the mountain bike scene that evolved in the west of the USA, in its mountain origins, and its backcountry terrain. It’s high, wild, and rowdy. It’s hard as heck – and proud of it. Central Colorado sits atop a huge, high plateau. Here you’ll find famous ski resorts like Aspen and Vail, as well as the biggest, bloodthirstiest mountain bike and gravel races in the world: Leadville and Steamboat.
Objects of Desire
This article appeared in the October 26, 2023 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. The Traveler (Abbas Kiarostami, 1974) A cart loaded with fragile treasures jolts at high speed through steep, uneven streets. The opening scene of Downpour (1972), the first feature film by Bahram Beyzaie, depicts the arrival of a schoolteacher in the poor Tehran neighborhood where he has been sent to work.
Riding a Quad Crown MTB event
The Quad Crown is Australia’s newest mountain bike event series and after years of work and a few setbacks, the four long-weekend events was finally able to kick off in Tasmania in April. The firest event, the Wild Penguin, earned its name by taking in the Wild Mersey and Penguin networks of trails around Devonport. Since then, we’ve seen the Sunny 80 thrill riders with perfect weather and sweet trails on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.
Reviews - Reverse Shot
No Escape By Imogen Sara Smith NYFF 2023: The Dupes (Al-Makhdu’un) Dir. Tewfik Saleh, Syria, 1972, Janus Films For migrants and refugees, the earth becomes a cruel obstacle course in which they gamble with their lives.
In a Strange Land
This article appeared in the October 3, 2023 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Read and listen to all of our coverage NYFF61 here. The Stranger and the Fog (Bahram Beyzaie, 1974) A small boat washes up on the beach near a village; its cargo is a man, unconscious and bloodied.
Muller, Eddie, Smith, Imogen Sara, Kronenberg, Michael: 9798860914032: Amazon.com: Books
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