For His Son

Nov 15, 1999 — Great comedy cannot be confined within normally accepted boundaries of taste and sensitivity. The essence of the Pythons was that they were always ready to take on formidable, daunting subjects that others might find too dangerous to contemplate. The idea...

Mar 29, 1999 — Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits was the most critically well-received children’s film in nearly two decades—and also the most challenging and rewarding fantasy-adventure movie since Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, released forty-one years earlier. At the dawn of the 1980s,...

Jun 21, 1994 — From the opening credits of Spike Lee’s seminal film, She’s Gotta Have It, viewers in 1986 were able to recognize the presence of an extraordinary talent. For it was Lee, a graduate of the New York University’s Tisch School of...

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...

Feb 3, 2015 — Jean-Luc Godard returned to the character-driven intensity of his earlier films with this satirical but serious-minded take on men, women, and money.

Sep 26, 2017 — This collection of excerpts from interviews with Stan Brakhage illuminates the evolution of his philosophy of film through his career.

Mar 18, 2025 — In what he described as his “first serious drama,” Charlie Chaplin channeled the influence of modernist literature, foreign cinema, and his European travels into a work of striking formal sophistication.

Mar 8, 2024 — This week calls for notes on some of the best writing on each of the ten nominees for Best Picture.

Mar 6, 2023 — The Daniels’ juggernaut has won seven top Indie Spirit Awards and swept the major guilds.

Sep 4, 2019 — The late actor became an icon of his generation with this moody, brilliant non-performance, informed by his intimate knowledge of chaos and death.