THE FIRST SOUND

Jan 31, 2020 — This week: Scorsese’s actresses, Paul Schrader’s plans, Lynne Sachs on Godard, Ritwik Ghatak’s rising reputation, and Bong Joon-ho everywhere.

Nov 19, 2018 — Taipei hosts an evening of surprises and controversy.

Oct 2, 2017 — Vulture has polled more than forty working screenwriters—their names and credits are listed—to come up with an annotated list of the “100 Best Screenwriters of All Time.” David Edelstein’s written the entry on the legend who’s landed at the top,...

Jul 10, 2017 — “While many of my more memorable screenings involved companions and cohorts—seeing Barbarella on a second date with the woman I’d eventually marry; catching a revival of Andrei Rublev with a friend as an elderly Russian lady noisily ate stinky borscht...

Jan 6, 2015 — Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into...

Dec 17, 2014 — Trenchant in its portrayal of gender dynamics, sophisticated in its look at the actor’s life, and, of course, hilarious, Tootsie is Hollywood comedy at its finest.

Mar 15, 2011 — Based on Louis Malle’s childhood memories, this period drama traces the wary, prickly friendship between two boys, one of whom is hiding from the Nazis.

Aug 20, 2007 — David Mamet’s debut film was a welcome throwback to the primacy of character and careful story construction, at a time when narrative intricacy was in short supply on American movie screens.

Jun 17, 2025 — Drawing from over a dozen hours of black-and-white footage, Direct Cinema pioneer Charlotte Zwerin created this elliptical and moving portrait of one of American music’s most original artists.

Jul 13, 2021 — Miles: I just sold a building on the Lower East Side and tripled my money Molly: There’s a lot of that happening these days. Released the year before Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Working Girls, a film about sex work, is a sharper by far...