Follow the Star

Oct 16, 2012 — After breaking out with Maria Full of Grace, filmmaker Joshua Marston visited a strange new land with persistent and deadly traditions.

Aug 14, 2012 — The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.

Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...

Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...

Apr 14, 2026 — Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is a film about fear. That may not entirely jibe with its reputation as a biblical parody, but it might be the movie’s secret strength—why it continues to strike a nerve today. Many of...

Oct 18, 2022 — Drawing from Latin American folklore, Jayro Bustamente conjures an intimate, supernatural tale that engages with Guatemala’s history of violence.

Aug 26, 2022 — In a pivotal early scene in this baseball classic, director Ron Shelton mischievously uses two contrasting rock tunes to comment on disparate versions of masculinity.

May 5, 2022 — Has Asian American cinematic representation really reached unprecedented heights, as almost all recent film coverage on the subject claims? In the past two years, critics’ polls, New York Times features, and Golden Globes scandals have marked the newfound success of...

Nov 10, 2020 — The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many...

May 14, 2019 — It all comes down to that first wink. About half an hour through Michael Haneke’s 1997 cause célèbre Funny Games, Paul (Arno Frisch), one of the two politely psychotic young home invaders who’ve taken a family captive, leads one of his...