Leave One Day

May 3, 2021 — A German mother travels to Hong Kong in search of her son—and herself—in one of the highlights of this year’s New Directors/New Films.

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.

Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda In September 2018, I screened Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places for the Michigan State University Film Collective. We had a lively discussion that went past the scheduled ending time. As I was getting...

May 28, 2020 — One of Fassbinder’s most beloved and abused performers, Hermann broke away and relaunched a lauded career.

Apr 10, 2020 — Songbook Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is the War and Peace of Taiwanese juvenile-delinquent movies. It is also part of a tradition of films that use the process of a character slowly learning a single song as a narrative-building...

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

Feb 10, 2020 — The ragman’s son became one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, working most memorably with Wilder, Minnelli, and Kubrick.

May 21, 2019 — Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) is one of the great films about middle-aged loneliness, specifically—though not exclusively—as women feel it. It’s not a dating movie, though there’s dating in it. And it’s not a feeling-sorry-for-oneself movie, though there are...

Jan 20, 2018 — On what would have been Saul Turell’s ninety-seventh birthday, Peter Cowie celebrates the man who was the beating heart behind Janus Films.

Mar 25, 2014 — Silent comedy superstar Harold Lloyd played big dreamers; few were more determined to succeed than the college football player Harold Lamb.