With or Without You

Aug 25, 2020 — Set among immigrants and laborers in an unglamorous corner of the South of France, Toni (1935) fulfills Jean Renoir’s wish to make a film in “a style as close as possible to that of daily encounters,” as he wrote in...

Mar 3, 2020 — American cinema is over 125 years old, and African Americans have been a part of it from the beginning. This participation has often been fraught, stymied, and curtailed, but the desire to use motion pictures to craft a self-image has...

Jan 21, 2020 — The Mankiewicz brothers, Jonas Mekas, Werner Herzog, Sidney Lumet, and Ja’Tovia Gary all figure in this month’s roundup.

Dec 11, 2018 — Note: The terms black and white were part of the way racial categories were referred to in South Africa under apartheid. Other terms, like nonwhite and non-European, were also used to mark racial segregation. In the following essay, the term...

Mar 2, 2018 — “This was a singular experience,” writes novelist Walter Mosley, who’s revisited Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) and turns in a powerful piece in the Hollywood Reporter. On the one hand, the “belief in the North as...

Feb 18, 2018 — “Nymphetmania has a long and hoary pedigree in Hollywood, and flourished years before Nabokov gave us the Lolita syndrome,” writes Molly Haskell in the Guardian. “D. W. Griffith’s child-woman ingénues such as Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh were ‘pseudo-nymphets’ (critic...

Jan 4, 2018 — Even as we look ahead to the films we’re hoping to see this year, there’s still some 2017 sorting to do. And let’s begin with Farran Smith Nehme’s refreshing list of some of the older films she caught last year....

Nov 21, 2017 — Ernst Lubitsch’s “world is defined by time as much as place,” writes Daniel Witkin in the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time. “Anachronistically straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, his characters embody unfashionable virtues of discretion and tact...

Jul 24, 2017 — In Issue 13 of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, editors Loretta Goff and Caroline V. Schroeter “bring together eight articles from around the world that interrogate the representation of race, ethnicity and identity on screen.”Kenta McGrath writes about...

May 31, 2017 — New Taiwan Cinema master Edward Yang’s sophomore feature explores the conflict between tradition and modernity reflected in a relationship on the rocks.