Blow Out

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...

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Nov 12, 2021 — A new podcast delves into the life and work of Chantal Akerman, and Reverse Shot opens a new symposium.

Oct 22, 2021 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. Americans have long been encouraged to buy into the...

Oct 20, 2021 — The late director of Canoa: A Shameful Memory aimed “to show people the real Mexico.”

Sep 10, 2021 — A political thriller, a batch of musicals, conversations with Steve Buscemi, and Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga are among this week’s highlights.

Jul 16, 2021 — The spotlight this week is on Sara Driver, Jacques Tati, Bill Duke, Lizzie Borden, and Nobuhiko Obayashi.

Jun 17, 2021 — The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience...

May 11, 2021 — When Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, in the summer of 1982, I was almost exactly the same age as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton, getting ready to start my sophomore year in high school. Like Stacy’s world-weary older...

Mar 9, 2021 — Stanley Kubrick’s lost-and-found Lunatic at Large and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Technically Sweet are back in the works.