The Kid & I

Mar 29, 2013 — When the world’s favorite comedian asked his audience to see him as a sociopathic serial killer, he was venturing where cinema had barely dared to tread.

Sep 28, 2011 — As a film student at the University of Southern California, new to LA and without connections, Patricia Resnick had a habit of following film trucks, just to see where they’d lead. One took her to Westwood and the set of...

Jun 27, 2011 — A rogue’s gallery of vituperative 1950s vixens and night-world tough-guy gargoyles all coalescing in a constellation of twinkling cold war lights, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is a film of a thousand stars. Stars of every sort, size, and description:...

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...

Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .

Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature is the kind of uncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector.

Nov 21, 2023 — The decades have flown by, but Mean Streets (1973) has not become the least bit dated, even though we know how the careers of all the principals have evolved in the years since, not to mention that the world just...

Sep 26, 2023 — Brett Morgen’s portrait of David Bowie is a free-associative hybrid of pop history and imaginative extravaganza—impressionistic, eclectically allusive, and, above all, immersive.