The Family Friend

Oct 24, 2005 — Mirroring changes in awareness, politics, and lifestyle occurring across the globe, the chanbara (or Japanese swordplay film) underwent a significant metamorphosis in the early 1960s, acquiring a decidedly more radical spirit. Seemingly without warning, groundbreaking cinematic styles from beyond the...

Jun 27, 2005 — Like his earlier adaptations of Terence Rattigan plays, Anthony Asquith’s late work is bereft of heavy-handed directorial flourishes.

Jul 14, 2026 — One of the funniest and most affecting scenes in 1970s Hollywood cinema is also one of the most quietly radical—no small feat in a decade of movies marked by wiggy experimentation, explosions of brutal and cathartic violence, and shaggy new...

Mar 30, 2026 — Suffused with visual beauty and moments of magical realism, Jess X. Snow’s queer diasporic cinema invites us to imagine new possibilities for freedom, transformation, and intergenerational healing.

Dec 17, 2025 — An amiable actor, Reiner launched his directorial career with a seven-film winning streak.

Oct 28, 2025 — The first of Arturo Ripstein’s films to receive wider international acclaim, this blood-soaked, surrealist vision of amour fou harks back to the director’s roots as an admirer and protégé of Luis Buñuel.

Jun 13, 2025 — Darling and Dogma are back in theaters, and Edmund White is remembered with his great essay on Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau.

Apr 22, 2025 — Adaptations, Hollywood histories, and Satyajit Ray’s cover designs feature in this month’s roundup.

Mar 25, 2025 — Unfettered by the precepts of bourgeois morality and the nuclear family, the characters in Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama struggle to find happiness as they navigate love’s whims and ambiguities.

Jan 21, 2025 — Lynchian may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.