Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle

Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Mar 16, 2021 — In Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), play is a life force, pleasure a form of liberation. Drawing inspiration from cartoons, Hollywood musicals, and the vaudeville shenanigans of early screen comedy in the vein of Buster Keaton and the Marx...

Aug 27, 2020 — In his novel All the Rest Have Died (1964), about his experience as a young actor in New York, Bill Gunn wrote, “I was always only slightly aware of the injustice the Black artist suffers while trying to create in...

Aug 25, 2020 — Set among immigrants and laborers in an unglamorous corner of the South of France, Toni (1935) fulfills Jean Renoir’s wish to make a film in “a style as close as possible to that of daily encounters,” as he wrote in...

Feb 25, 2020 — In these times of Trumpidation, thirty years after its auspicious release, Paris Is Burning seems even more relevant than it did in early 1991, when I wrote the following for Black Film Review about Jennie Livingston’s phenomenal documentary on New...

May 10, 1993 — Green for Danger is a welcome twist on that most venerable of English concoctions, the drawing-room thriller. In this instance, the drawing room is instead a hospital not far from London, where surgery is conducted under a cascade of German...

Jan 11, 1988 — Alfred Hitchcock committed a shocking murder in Sabotage (1936). Here, in one of the director’s darkest works, a child unknowingly carrying a bomb is blown to pieces in the streets of London. The death of Stevie is a deliberate attempt...

Sep 24, 2025 — She won the hearts of audiences and costars in The Leopard, 8½, and Fitzcarraldo.

Sep 28, 2022 — This melodrama, made by André de Toth in his native Hungary, anticipates the unease of the director’s postwar Hollywood films with an array of radical stylistic choices and jarring visual tensions.

Feb 1, 2022 — Douglas Sirk’s 1956 masterpiece is a visceral tragedy that lays bare the spiritual malaise of the ruling class.