Be Here Now

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.

Feb 14, 2013 — David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s textbook Film Art, a cornerstone of the cinema studies discipline, was first published in 1979 and is now in a tenth edition. Over the years, some sections have been taken out, either to make room...

Feb 5, 2013 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.

Jan 30, 2013 — The improvisational arts of filmmaking, jazz, and chili.

Jan 22, 2013 — Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema.

Jan 8, 2013 — The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The...

Dec 11, 2012 — The climate change expert discusses how Godfrey Reggio’s films presaged widespread concern about global warming and warned about the dangers of consumerism.

Dec 5, 2012 — In René Clément’s sparkling but menacing anti-noir, the Mediterranean setting is as seductive as Alain Delon’s baby blues.