Michael Koresky

In Albert Lewin’s cagey adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, homosexuality is viewed as it was in much of classical Hollywood cinema: as an eerie monstrosity.

A racist, traditionally desexualized archetype from classic Hollywood gets queered and eroticized in Cheryl Dunye’s indie landmark The Watermelon Woman, now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Whether sublimated or made explicit, that longing feeling so specific to the queer experience has always existed in the movies. A new series on the Criterion Channel dives into this richly layered but long-suppressed cinematic history.

With megawatt performers in front of the camera and remarkable talent behind the scenes, the golden-age MGM musical became Hollywood’s most utopian expression of joy.

Now playing on the Criterion Channel, Christopher Munch’s New Queer Cinema landmark The Hours and Times excavates a gay fantasy from the annals of Fab Four lore.

Songbook

The Platters’ impassioned rendition of the pop chestnut “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” highlights the irrevocable loss in Andrew Haigh’s marriage drama.

One Scene

Romantic love is poignant because it is an infinite feeling that exists in a finite frame. And Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy is the most romantic and profound of love stories because it imbues love with the weight of time. In these three films…

Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.

In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.

Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.

Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

The films Agnès Varda made while living on the West Coast of the United States are some of the most searching and challenging of her stellar career.

Performances

The late character actor Michael Jeter had a profound effect on me as a child, but as with so many things, I didn’t realize it until I was an adult. Twenty-five years ago this month, I saw my first Tony Awards broadcast. Amid all the spectacle—os…

Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a

future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

Performances

Who is Tootsie, anyway?

The prolific and popular Keisuke Kinoshita made his fascinating first movies at a time of great difficulty and censorship, yet their spirit and brilliance shine through.

The following is excerpted from the book-length study Terence Davies, out September 8. See the bottom of the post for a clip of the scene it describes. Excerpt copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois and used with perm…

Performances

Today, the idea that comedian-actor-writer Lily Tomlin possesses dramatic versatility is so received that one might not realize how unexpected it was for audiences to see her in a serious role in Robert Altman’s Nashville in 1975. At that point, sh…

Performances

We don’t often talk about documentaries as featuring performances. But consider the highly performative people at the centers of Grey Gardens, General Idi Amin Dada, and last year’s The Act of Killing, or even the seemingly more modest souls …

Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Satyajit Ray was ailing when he made them, but these three works from the great filmmaker’s final years show an artist at the height of his powers.

From the beginning, it was clear that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was destined to shake up German cinema.

Performances

In Rosemary’s Baby, one of the first exclamations that Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) makes on hearing the news that her young neighbor Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is expecting a little bundle of joy is “I can’t wait to tell Laura-Louise!” Earlier…

Four of the great Japanese director’s lesser-known, early films show the coming into being of a political artist.