The Liberation of L.B. Jones

Jun 22, 2020 — Songbook At first it’s just one of many Fellini-esque dances: a band switches to an upbeat tune, Nino Rota’s “Caracalla’s (La Bersagliera),” and a previously dour party becomes an impromptu circle of ecstatic movement. Though overshadowed in La dolce vita...

Dec 10, 2013 — Djibril Diop Mambety’s Senegalese masterwork is remarkable for both its technical audacity and its postcolonialist expressionism.

Aug 14, 2006 — La collectionneuse is a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a Riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste. In retrospect, it is both classically Rohmeresque and atypical, as befits a film in which the director was still finding his way....

Jan 5, 2026 — One of France’s biggest stars took the world by storm before her reputation took a turn.

Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.

Dec 3, 2024 — Absent from so many critics’ best-of-2024 lists, A Different Man wins Best Feature.

May 18, 2021 — The 1892 Chinese novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai opens with a prologue in which the author, Han Ziyun, writes from his own perspective, providing a gateway into the book by describing a dream he has had. Referring to himself...

Aug 30, 2012 — In the 1960s, Mailer, already a literary legend, was inspired by the avant-garde film movement to take a stab at his own, anti-Warholian underground cinema.

Jun 3, 1991 — Jean Marais on the set of Beauty and the Beast An excerpt from Cocteau: A Biography (1970) by Francis Steegmuller Beauty and the Beast, the first film of Cocteau’s own since The Blood of a Poet, and his finest poem since...

Sep 12, 2025 — Pasolini, Kurosawa, and a week so busy we need to wrap with a lightning round.