The Portrait

Mar 13, 2025 — Top prizes in the narrative and documentary feature competitions go to Amy Wang and Benjamin Flaherty.

Jun 2, 2023 — This week we’re spotlighting Ken Jacobs, queer cinema in the 1990s, and the return of the afro-horn.

Mar 18, 2021 — The range this month is wide, from Tsai Ming-liang to Ida Lupino, from Tobe Hooper to Josephine Baker.

Feb 27, 2019 — Studio Visits Growing up in Houston, Texas, in the 1970s and ’80s, Greg Ruth fell in love with art but had a hard time imagining himself pursuing it professionally. But almost three decades of devotedly plying his craft as an illustrator in a...

Sep 1, 2017 — New York. “A film series dedicated to one episode of a television series is—without going overboard—fairly unprecedented,” writes Jeremy Polacek for Hyperallergic, previewing Gotta Light?, the Metrograph series built around Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, now on through...

Jun 10, 2017 — On Wednesday, Martin Scorsese, in partnership with the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO, officially launched the African Film Heritage Project. The Film Foundation, founded and chaired by Scorsese, will take part in the restoration of fifty African films....

Mar 9, 2021 — “Oral tradition is a tradition of images. What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in direct...

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Tradition and modernity collide in the sensuous films of this Indian American director, whose vibrant portraits of urban life and cross-cultural conflict give voice to people navigating an increasingly globalized world.

May 29, 2026 — We’re revisiting work by Tarkovsky, Pelechian, and Portabella as well as two films with the word Dead in the title.