Life or Something Like It

Nov 19, 2007 — Akira Kurosawa explores criminal machismo in his seventh film, which he felt was his official breakthrough in Japanese cinema.

Aug 27, 2024 — A brilliant satire, inspired by a 1973 PBS documentary series that gave rise to the reality-television genre, Albert Brooks’s first feature film examines the ethical dilemmas of combining cheap entertainment and sociological experiment.

Jun 20, 2023 — In their first collaboration, director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter explore the cultural fissures in modern England by dramatizing a kind of role-play in which no role is stable or easy to define.

Apr 16, 2020 — Performances If Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-sixth president, continues to inspire a morbid fascination in some of us, the reasons for this extend beyond the obviously exceptional aspects of his career—his reelection in 1972, one of the largest landslide victories...

Apr 2, 2019 — Mike Leigh’s endless fascination with human behavior is palpable in every one of the films he’s made over the course of his nearly fifty-year career. With an acute sensitivity to rhythm, character, and setting, he extracts extraordinary moments from the...

Nov 12, 2015 — The Writers Guild of America has just assembled a list of the “101 Funniest Screenplays” of all time, which pays tribute to comedy classics ranging from Buster Keaton's The General to James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News.

Jun 21, 1994 — From the opening credits of Spike Lee’s seminal film, She’s Gotta Have It, viewers in 1986 were able to recognize the presence of an extraordinary talent. For it was Lee, a graduate of the New York University’s Tisch School of...

Jul 24, 2026 — Names on our minds this week: Mike Mills, Jean Renoir, Ronee Blakley, and Luchino Visconti.

Jul 29, 2025 — Mystery, intrigue, and illicit passion thrive in one of America’s most complex and expansive cities, captured in all of its glory in such crime thrillers as Out of Sight, Miami Vice, and China Moon.

Oct 23, 2024 — This month brings new books on Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, unhappy writers, and classic documentaries.