A Pain in the Ass

Mar 26, 2007 — Across five films, the Swedish director defined his guiding themes and cinematic style.

Oct 16, 2006 — Lodge Kerrigan’s grim, lucid dispatch from the murky depths of madness situates itself inside the tormented consciousness of a schizophrenic.

Dec 6, 2011 — Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933) is what sexy should be—delightful, romantic, agonizing ecstasy. And it’s not just sexy but also revolutionary, daring, sweet, sour, cynical, carefree, poignant, and so far ahead of its time that one could cite it...

Oct 25, 2022 — One of the few American films of its era directed by a Black woman, Kasi Lemmons’s feature debut advances a critique of patriarchy and asks questions about gender and sexuality that still resonate today.

Aug 23, 2019 — A good number of the pieces that have stood out this week examine the ways that music and cinema have informed each other’s traditions.

Mar 11, 2020 — One Scene With his Oscar-nominated debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, director Benh Zeitlin brought to the screen a vision of Louisiana that combined the unique flavors and textures of his adopted home state with the magical twists and...

Mar 30, 2018 — New York. “Today’s manliest movie stars—mostly buffed-up superheroes like your Chrises Hemsworth, Pratt, and Evans—are scientifically enlarged and formed by state-of-the-art training and diet regimens,” writes Vern in the Village Voice. “Guys like Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and...

Jan 25, 2019 — Deep into Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, we sit in on a leisurely dinner-table chat that appears to be unrelated to the film’s main event, an illegal abortion conducted in a seedy hotel. After...

Jan 20, 2020 — In celebration of Federico Fellini’s 100th birthday, the director of The Farewell talks about the deeply moving final scene of Nights of Cabiria and its mixture of pain and hope.

Jan 25, 2010 — Unlike the more aesthetically and intellectually conceived French New Wave, Italian neorealism was above all an ethical initiative—a way of saying that people were important, occasioned by a war that made many of them voiceless, faceless, and nameless victims. But...