American Me

May 22, 2017 — To toast the seventieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, which has been in full swing since last Wednesday, I’m spending this week looking back on a top-prize winner from each decade of the festival’s history, dishing up details on...

Apr 27, 2017 — Blending irreverent comedy and surreal eroticism, Juzo Itami’s international hit is a utopian look at the peculiarities of gastronomic culture.

Mar 21, 2017 — A “celluloid atrocity” overflowing with deviant shenanigans, John Waters’s low-budget satire makes mincemeat of the peace-and-love era.

Jan 19, 2017 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.

Jan 11, 2017 — A revelatory restoration of Lewis Milestone’s underappreciated newsroom comedy accentuates the film’s punchy rhythms and breakneck banter.

Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.

Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.

Nov 30, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the seventy-third birthday of one of American cinema’s most lyrical and enigmatic storytellers. Over the course of more than four decades, Terrence Malick has established a distinctive aesthetic that juxtaposes the majestic beauty of nature with the...

Sep 21, 2016 — An exhilarating blend of noir and splatter-flick tropes, the Coen brothers’ debut feature established their unique brand of cosmic fatalism.

Sep 11, 2016 — On his seventy-sixth birthday, we’re celebrating the work of Hollywood enfant terrible Brian De Palma, whose iconoclastic five-decade career has encompassed an astonishing array of genres, including erotic thriller, war drama, and science fiction.