So Can I

Sep 13, 2004 — Fifteen years ago I received a letter from a young film director in Texas, who enclosed a tape of his first film, with the unlikely title It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. It might as well have...

Aug 9, 2024 — Dylan and Peckinpah, Tomoko Tabata and Shinji Somai, and Carol Kane and Nathan Silver are among this week’s rich pairings.

Oct 26, 2021 — Considered his first directly political film, Satyajit Ray’s 1960 masterpiece explores how the denial of self-knowledge, a void neither religion nor Western rationalism can fill, takes a toll on women in Indian society.

Feb 12, 2019 — The competition is struggling as China yanks one film and theater owners threaten another.

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.

Oct 15, 2009 — Full-size sidewalks aren’t very common in outer Tokyo, particularly in the many small residential neighborhoods that surround the city for miles. Likely a holdover from when there weren’t as many cars around and people walked in the roads alongside carts...

Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.

Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.

Dec 22, 2025 — The critic and curator talks about working on a program of films by trailblazing Black women directors, which opened at London’s BFI Southbank this year and is now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Dec 11, 2025 — Charli XCX stars in three of them, and another highlight is a restored documentary by the late William Greaves.