Up Against It

Mar 19, 1996 — “[He] loves to set his figures in action against greenish or purplish backgrounds, in which we can glimpse the phosphorescence of decay and sniff the coming storm.”—Charles Baudelaire, writing on Edgar Allan Poe What’s striking about Seven is that the...

Mar 30, 1992 — John Schlesinger’s controversial masterpiece made moviegoers squirm with its bold, bleak portrayal of unrequited love, gay and otherwise, and it remains as jolting and thought-provoking as ever.

Jan 28, 1991 — The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in...

Sep 14, 2026 — May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown wins the Golden Lion, and NAZA, codirected by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, wins a Special Jury Prize.

Aug 25, 2026 — The pioneering husband-and-wife duo transformed the field of Japanese nonfiction cinema with their portraits of spectacular, edgy personalities and collectives under duress.

Aug 20, 2026 — A retrospective spotlights the writer’s collaborations with Carol Reed, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Alberto Cavalcanti, and George Cukor.

Aug 11, 2026 — Set in 1930s French West Africa, Bertrand Tavernier’s hard-to-classify adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel Pop. 1280 offers an apocalyptic vision of a society in which institutions have abdicated their moral authority.

Aug 7, 2026 — The members of this influential leftist collective created a formally adventurous body of work that examined the nation’s tumultuous history through a postcolonial lens.

Jul 27, 2026 — Some read Thomson’s new book as an attack on cinema; others argue that they’re missing the point.

Jul 17, 2026 — This week brings conversations with Jeffrey Wright, John Woo, and the members of three cinema collectives.