Breaking In

Feb 27, 2017 — The premiere screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura in 1960 was one of the most infamously divisive in Cannes Film Festival history. While Antonioni’s opaque characterizations and languorous pacing retain their ability to befuddle uninitiated viewers, these qualities also marked the...

Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.

Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...

Jul 20, 2022 — A brutal critique of the American dream, Carl Franklin’s 1995 thriller explicitly confronts the racialized implications of classic film noir.

Oct 21, 2020 — The subject of two new biographies, the Hollywood icon is being celebrated in his hometown.

Mar 24, 2021 — Performances By the time The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1962, Frank Sinatra had been on American screens and in American hearts for nearly two decades. His bobby-soxers had been displaced by Elvis fans, who had been displaced by Beatles...

Sep 26, 2017 — The sexual pedagogy of a masochistic music instructor takes center stage in this shocking study of art, control, and repression.

Apr 9, 2014 — As Emily Watson told us in an interview for our release of Breaking the Waves, which comes out next week, she had “hardly been in front of a camera ever before” when she shot Lars von Trier’s devastasting and explicit...