Look Back in Anger

Jan 19, 2018 — Two marvels of midcentury social commentary now streaming on the Criterion Channel show how progress can be a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward process.

Sep 2, 2014 — The following is excerpted from the book-length study Terence Davies, out September 8. See the bottom of the post for a clip of the scene it describes. Excerpt copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois...

Jun 21, 2016 — Animated in Czechoslovakia amid a Soviet invasion, the French film Fantastic Planet, the third collaboration between René Laloux and Roland Topor, timelessly renders its surreal sci-fi story of captivity and resistance.

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...

Aug 26, 2013 — From the beginning, it was clear that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was destined to shake up German cinema.

Nov 17, 2017 — G rasshopper Film has posted Ted Fendt’s essay on Moses and Aaron (1974), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera: “Straub and Huillet’s brilliance—and a fundamental aspect of their method of adaptation—is to allow the contradictions...

Sep 25, 2019 — Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson star as a couple whose breakup turns nasty at the hands of “the divorce-industrial complex.”

Jul 28, 2022 — Directing the Monkees in Head and Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, Rafelson was a key figure of the New Hollywood.

Apr 7, 2021 — Songbook Zula knocks back two shots like they’re water, picks up a brimming martini glass, and struts right up to her current lover’s former lover—a poetess, at that—to introduce herself. “Bon soir,” says Zula, French still a little heavier on...

Oct 23, 2025 — For many critics and fans, the only problem with the five-hour series is that it isn’t twice as long.