The Killing

Feb 4, 2021 — Here’s an overview of what critics have been saying about this year’s winners.

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Dec 6, 2019 — Starting this weekend on the Criterion Channel, you’ll be able to steal some time with one of cinema’s most pulse-pounding subgenres. In the heist movie, even the most perfectly planned crimes run the risk of going awry, putting the mettle...

Apr 24, 2019 — When It Rains Charles Burnett has long been recognized by historians as one of the greatest American film directors, and he’s won numerous important awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2017. Nevertheless, he is still relatively unknown beyond the world...

Jan 18, 2019 — Dark Passages Getting old, in Hollywood, is at least a misfortune, if not a crime. But film noir had plenty of room for actors who looked the worse for wear, whose mileage showed on their faces, whose youth was less...

Dec 14, 2018 — “It’s sad to say, but women do not have much importance in westerns,” observed Anthony Mann, a master of the genre, in a 1957 Cahiers du cinéma interview. Made that same year, Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns begins with a whopper...

Jul 16, 2018 — Burning Secret would have been an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s 1913 novella.

Apr 20, 2018 — “Although her oeuvre to date is wide-ranging,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, Claire Denis’s “most celebrated films are those that probe, usually elliptically, the legacy of French colonial rule in Africa, as seen in Chocolat (1988), her semiautobiographical debut feature;...

Apr 2, 2018 — This week sees the openings of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Locarno in Los Angeles, and DOC10 in Chicago, and I’ll have separate entries on all three events in a couple of days. New York. The BAMcinématek series Tough...