The Men

Jun 12, 2019 — One Scene One of the most talked-about movies at this year’s Sundance, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is both a rhapsodic portrait of first-time director Joe Talbot’s native city and a mournful look at how gentrification, income inequality,...

Mar 29, 2019 — When Carlos Reygadas’s debut film, Japón, came out in 2002, my generation was just starting to drive cars, smoke weed, use contraceptives. A movie ticket at the Cineteca Nacional still cost only twenty pesos then if you showed your student...

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Aug 20, 2012 — In conceiving his film Weekend, British writer-editor-director Andrew Haigh posed a challenge to himself—to create a tale of two men falling in love that would both honestly reflect the contemporary gay experience and appeal to a wider, heterosexual audience. There’s no question...

Mar 27, 2012 — Noël Coward and David Lean created a patriotic diptych with their first two films: In Which We Serve, from 1942, about the bravery and sacrifice of British sailors and those who love them, and the 1944 This Happy Breed, on...

Jan 17, 2012 — At once a political epic and a radical gesture in personal filmmaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic is an unexpected, unlikely triumph. It was a film that Hollywood didn’t want to make—every studio in town turned it down—that went on to secure...

Oct 12, 1998 — Are there cultural purists still remaining who would argue that the “Westernized” title of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece—High and Low—throws polluted water on the cosmological fire of its given name: Tengoku to jigoku—literally, Heaven and Hell?Kurosawa’s once insisted-upon reputation as...

The comedian, actor, and writer recalls wearing out videotapes of Mothra vs. Godzilla; praises Sound of Metal and its star, Riz Ahmed; and talks about the power and importance of seeing love between two Asian men depicted on-screen in Happy...

Jan 5, 2026 — One of France’s biggest stars took the world by storm before her reputation took a turn.

Jul 24, 2025 — Directed by Jack Bond, It Couldn’t Happen Here is a strange and compelling document of the synth-pop duo at the height of their success, as well as a darkly absurdist send-up of provincial England in the Thatcher era.