The Substance

Mar 8, 2021 — “I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant...

Mar 30, 1992 — John Schlesinger’s controversial masterpiece made moviegoers squirm with its bold, bleak portrayal of unrequited love, gay and otherwise, and it remains as jolting and thought-provoking as ever.

Jul 21, 2023 — Names in the news this week: Agnès Varda, Hayao Miyazaki, Jafar Panahi, Savanah Leaf—and Bree Daniels.

Jan 14, 2022 — This week we’re watching and reading about Tom Noonan, Jean Vigo, Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Miklós Jancsó.

Feb 7, 2018 — “Paul Clipson, the San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker once described as a ‘poet of cinema,’ died unexpectedly Saturday at the age of fifty-three,” reports Kevin L. Jones for KQED. “Clipson made dozens of short films and collaborated frequently with experimental musicians...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Since I saw Faces Places at its premiere at Cannes in May, [Agnès] Varda’s latest documentary has cemented itself on my running list of the year’s best titles,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Made with the French...

May 2, 2017 — On a trip to the Library of Congress’s Mostly Lost workshop—affectionately known as “film-geek heaven”—Imogen Sara Smith joined early-cinema aficionados in uncovering treasures from the vaults.

Aug 8, 2018 — The concrete bunker looms up surreally from the rolling green countryside, a huge brutalist fortress sprouting from a hillside thick with wildflowers. This is the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, also known as the Packard...

Apr 9, 2013 — This review by film critic Janet Maslin originally appeared in the December 27, 1991, edition of the New York Times, and appears by permission of the author. Naked Lunch, adapted by the dauntless David Cronenberg from William S. Burroughs’s 1959...