A Dream of Iron

Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...

Oct 16, 2019 — This month’s round includes new critical assessments of Bresson and Rohmer, Hollywood memoirs, and interviews with living legends.

Sep 17, 2019 — Fusing the melodrama of Douglas Sirk and the ballyhoo of William Castle, John Waters’ sixth feature, Polyester (1981), was a departure from the scrofulous 16 mm mode of production he had made his cult name plying to midnight-movie crowds in...

Oct 16, 2018 — Seen as a light-hearted farce upon its release, this star-studded comedy by Hal Ashby stands as one of Hollywood’s most prescient portraits of post-Watergate politics.

May 29, 2018 — John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy is a milestone along several different paths of movie history, all of which converged at the majestically seedy crossroads of Times Square in the spring of 1968.

Jul 25, 2017 — Albert Brooks brings the gift for comic deconstruction he honed in his stand-up career to this uproarious satire of baby boomer values.

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.

Oct 13, 2016 — From its diffusely structured narrative to its innovative cinematography, this radical western is a showcase for Robert Altman’s iconoclastic style.

Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.