The Base

Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...

May 22, 2020 — The Times of Harvey Milk Today—May 22, 2020—would have been Harvey Milk’s ninetieth birthday. Harvey was forty-five when I first met him in his camera store; I was nineteen. Harvey was murdered when he was just forty-eight, and I’m now...

Jan 29, 2020 — It is almost impossible to discuss Sidney Lumet’s Cold War thriller Fail Safe without also considering its more financially successful cinematic foil and fellow 1964 Columbia Pictures release, Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to...

Jul 15, 2019 — Studio Visits Looking at a painting by Gregory Manchess is like stepping into another world. Over the course of his forty years as a professional illustrator, the Kentucky-born, New York– and Oregon-based Manchess has created an adventurous and sweepingly immersive...

Apr 3, 2019 — This month’s round features Dalí’s Marx Brothers movie, Bergman family drama, Welles’s unpublished play, and more.

Mar 15, 2019 — Featured in this week’s round: Edgar G. Ulmer, Stanley Kubrick, Jia Zhangke, and Guy Maddin.

May 8, 2018 — Horror movies are often understood as products of the imagination, but in the case of Caroline Monnet and Daniel Watchorn’s work, the conventions of the genre are grounded in stories of real-life injustice. Set in a Canadian residential school for...

Mar 7, 2018 — The two big film festivals of April, one for each coast, have made major lineup announcements. The Tribeca Film Festival has rolled out all of its feature titles for its seventeenth edition, running from April 18 through 29. Last month,...

Feb 14, 2018 — Until the Oscars are presented on March 4, it’s not yet too late to be looking back at the best of 2017. The Village Voice has polled over a hundred critics, and Phantom Thread has come out on top with...

Jan 21, 2018 — “In a festival that rarely wants for political currency,” writes Justin Chang in a dispatch from Sundance to the Los Angeles Times, “it’s surely no coincidence that Blindspotting and Monsters and Men, the first two films to screen in this...