Big B

Sep 28, 2015 — Rarely has schizophrenia been closer to the surface of American cinema than in the transitional period of 1968–71. Hollywood had just abandoned its censorship code after nearly thirty-five years, and the behemoth studios were heaving and rattling into oblivion or...

Sep 21, 2015 — Krzysztof Kieślowski’s political and philosophical rumination, which marked an important turning point in the director's career, imagines a young man's life branching off in three possible directions.

Sep 1, 2015 — Anyone interested in the art of nonfiction filmmaking should get familiar with the work of Allan King. The Canadian documentarian was a pioneer of the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960s, alongside Albert and David Maysles, Richard Leacock, and D....

Aug 10, 2015 — When they starred together in The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981, Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons were not yet the movie icons we know them as today. Though Streep had already won a best supporting actress Oscar for Kramer vs....

Jul 30, 2015 — It is now thirty years since the release of Stephen Frears’s film, which was both a product of and a response to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain and depicted the lives of Pakistani immigrants with wit and...

Jul 22, 2015 — Stephen Frears brings a playful and shimmering cinematic quality to Hanif Kureishi’s multilayered script about a Pakistani immigrant community in Margaret Thatcher–era London.

Jul 14, 2015 — Carroll Ballard’s film is a work of rapture, a mesmerizing adventure that envelops the viewer in the beauties of the natural world.

Jul 6, 2015 — The Killers (1946) is exemplary film noir from Robert Siodmak, who, on the strength of three films—this, Phantom Lady (1944), and Criss Cross (1949)—stands beside his fellow European exiles Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger as one of noir’s crucial directors....

Jul 2, 2015 — Les Blank’s A Poem Is a Naked Person, in theaters courtesy of Janus Films, is a major rediscovery. Now playing at New York’s Film Forum before expanding to cities across the United States, including Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San...

Jul 2, 2015 — Repertory PicksAmong Dustin Hoffman’s indelible cinematic creations are The Graduate’s awkward Benjamin Braddock, Midnight Cowboy’s apoplectic Ratzo Rizzo, and Rain Man’s autistic Raymond Babbit. But nothing in this chameleon’s oeuvre compares to his Dorothy Michaels, the female alter ego invented...