Contra

Sep 24, 2025 — Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.

Sep 24, 2025 — Propelled by outstanding performances from Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel, Jacques Audiard’s third feature is the rare French crime film built around a complex female character who takes initiative in a male-dominated world.

Sep 22, 2025 — The director of the documentary Celluloid Underground discusses his life as a curator, Iranian film culture, and the inherent ephemerality of cinema.

Sep 18, 2025 — No movie star was bigger in the 1970s, and he won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People. But Sundance may be his most impactful legacy.

Sep 17, 2025 — One of the most influential comedies of the 1980s, Rob Reiner’s rock-and-roll satire is a remarkably authentic, lived-in portrait of musicians, their egotism, and the industry that feeds off their stardom.

Sep 16, 2025 — A portrait of a new generation of feminist consciousness in the New York art world, Lizzie Borden’s first film project spikes with a persistent friction between the filmmaker and her documentary subjects.

Sep 11, 2025 — For J. Hoberman, the film “more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary.”

Aug 26, 2025 — Zeinabu irene Davis’s sole narrative feature is a vision of the past as it might have been, as well as an exploration of how history becomes a part of the everyday rhythms of Black life.

Aug 25, 2025 — In such provocative delights as Jamón jamón and Golden Balls, one of Spain’s most original directors celebrates the sensual pleasures of food and sex while capturing the rapid changes his country experienced at the turn of the millennium.

Aug 19, 2025 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece captures the indifference and hostility of the adult world through the eyes of two young boys who share a bond stronger than that of family.