Birth of Light

May 19, 2026 — New films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and James Gray are riding high on the Cannes critics’ grids.

Dec 17, 2025 — Amid the disorientation of the COVID-19 era, this rousing film cut through with a life-affirming reminder that community and connection are still possible.

Apr 6, 2022 — A playfully philosophical drama, My American Uncle has been largely forgotten, yet it is the most down-to-earth of the French master’s exhilarating engagements with modernist aesthetics.

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Oct 13, 2020 — I know I need somethingOr someone. From “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day” (1978), by Nikki Giovanni While the screen is still dark, Gladys Knight’s voice drifts in, in a strong, sincere belt: “How can I / Work out this...

Jul 16, 2008 — The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled...

May 23, 2023 — Anatomy of a Fall, May December, and About Dry Grasses are among the critical favorites in competition in Cannes.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

Apr 22, 2025 — This year’s edition spotlights work by Dea Kulumbegashvili, Alex Ross Perry, Eva Victor, and Ryan White.