Before I Wake

May 31, 2022 — Billy Wilder’s classic film noir is a powerful meditation on masculinity, desire, and the fantasies of white America.

May 17, 2022 — Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

May 16, 2022 — This month we’re reading about David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Hong Sangsoo, and Werner Herzog.

Apr 5, 2022 — A series at Vulture and Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This revisit the erotic movies of the 1980s and ’90s.

Mar 29, 2022 — About half an hour into love jones, Theodore Witcher’s romance from 1997 starring Larenz Tate and Nia Long, the two main characters amble along a Chicago block as raindrops fall, soft but insistent. The colors are warm, naturalistic—browns, mauves, and...

Jan 7, 2022 — Travel this weekend with Stanley Kubrick, David Bowie, Sarah Maldoror, Lana Wachowski, and Tsai Ming-liang.

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

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.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films Come on now, honey sugarYou know your baby loveYou know just the other dayI was gonna take you to go see a movieSweet Sweetback . . . Stevie Wonder, “Sweet Little Girl,” 1972 We went...

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...