The canon cries out for rejuvenation, and so we size up another annual Allen tradition: the commemoration of his greatest hits.
What Woody Allen is to New York, Gus Van Sant is to Portland.
Frances Ha feels like an unusually intimate, personal piece, a return to Noah Baumbach’s early, more naïvely optimistic phase.
To call Van Sant’s seminal film trashy or backward—or simply a “time capsule”—is to ignore the insights into gay life it still holds today.