Whit Stillman has, kind of, always been making Jane Austen adaptations: his 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is a loose reworking of Mansfield Park, in addition to mentioning Austen in the dialogue, and his entire career to this point (five movies and an Amazon pilot that didn’t get picked up, in 26 years – also a 1996 […]

The return to active filmmaking, after a 14-year drought, of writer-director Whit Stillman, was cause for celebration all by itself: we need more unrepentantly idiosyncratic voices. That the film which he he effects that return, Damsels in Distress, is such a frothy delight, too self-assured and solidly crafted, with too much subdued melancholy hiding underneath […]

With The Last Days of Disco writer-director-etc. Whit Stillman solidified the pattern that had begun with his 1994 sophomore effort Barcelona of taking four years off in between his breezy, talky comedies: four years that were very well spent, though I do not know and to be honest do not care if the time was […]

Released in 1994,Whit Stillman’s sophomore film Barcelona came out four years after its predecessor, Metropolitan. In the context of his later career, this can be described as pretty quick turnaround. On the other hand, four years is a whole lot of time to work on a second feature, and given how pointedly artificial and fussy […]

A cluster of circumstances have made this the ideal moment to spring into an exceedingly low-key retrospective of an exceedingly low-key filmmaker: herewith, Mondays in April will be devoted to the films of one of America’s most deliciously minor indie directors, Whit Stillman. There are two terribly important, and tightly related things to know about […]