Daily Archives: September 8, 2026

Review of James Naremore’s CINEMA THEN AND NOW

James Naremore, Cinema Then and Now: Conversations with Craig S. Simpson, New York: Sticking Place Books, 2025, 254 pp., $20 cloth, $16 paper.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Many book-length interviews with film critics have been appearing in vertically-shaped volumes from the highly energetic Sticking Place Books over the past couple of years, starting with Michel Ciment and already including Joseph McBride, Patrick McGilligan, Leonard Maltin, James Naremore, Gerald Peary, Pierre Rissient, myself, and David Sterritt so far — even more by the time this review reaches print. Thanks to an inclusive policy that allows Maltin, Naremore, and Rissient to rub shoulders, there’s also a variety of lengths ranging from Rissient’s (167 pages) to McBride’s (730 pages), suggesting a welcome freedom from standardized formats and a willingness to let each volume establish its own rules and priorities. It appears that the critics have been invited to
pick their own interviewers. Naremore selected Craig S. Simpson, a former colleague and former manuscript archivist at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, and part of what makes this book an enjoyable page-turner in spite of its boilerplate title are the relaxed and sometimes playful discussions between these friends, even when they disagree (Simpson, for instance, likes both Robert Altman and Pauline Kael, unlike Naremore). Read more

Saint Omer

Like almost every other year within recent memory, I wind up seeing a masterpiece after I can vote for it or include it in any poll. Alice Diop’s first fiction feature is a classical example of a film that asks questions more than provides answers, and one of its best ways of posing or suggesting questions is not cutting to a reverse angle whenever you’re expecting it to. This is a film carried largely by its close-ups and its dialogue, and many of its reverse angles are between its two protagonists, two young and black Senegalese women in France who never meet, although they do exchange glances at one climactic, privileged moment. It’s a film devoted to a trial whose outcome is never recorded, but it has generated enough questions by the end to make a verdict seem either impossible or superfluous. Consciously or not, it carries more than one echo of Ousmane Sembene’s great La noire de… (Black Girl, 1966). [1/3/2023]

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