The Stage

Oct 19, 2023 — Her entrance in the film is impossible to forget. She swings into the scene to serve a patron some coffee, holding a cup in one hand and a book in the other. Her diamond-shaped face is obscured, but her aura...

Sep 26, 2023 — In this vibrant, music-filled portrait of an artist and his community, director Luis Valdez gathers what little is known about rock-and-roll idol Ritchie Valens and fuses it with a lived-in understanding of what it is to be Chicano.

Mar 28, 2023 — Described by director Joan Micklin Silver as “a kind of weird romantic comedy,” this defiantly ambiguous exploration of amour fou presents its obsessive antihero in all his contradictions.

Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...

Apr 25, 2022 — During a precarious time for film exhibition, Inney Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, had an idea to rethink the bounds of nonfiction cinema. He ended up conceiving Prismatic Ground, a festival that launched...

Jun 14, 2021 — Postwar Hollywood’s quintessential heavy wields his signature mix of brutality and neurosis to embody an abusive husband in Max Ophuls’s psychological drama.

Apr 13, 2021 — To fall deeply in love means to take a risk, and no romantic movie is riskier than History Is Made at Night (1937). Producer Walter Wanger came up with the very grand and suggestive title, but he had only two...

Jan 26, 2021 — I stumbled onto Will Niava’s debut short film, Zoo, via a still I saw online: a close-up of a young man’s face under blue neon, framed by cigarette smoke. Curious about this striking image, I tracked down the film and...

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

Apr 28, 2020 — “Fuck! Fuck you fuck me fuck old people fuck children fuck peace! Fuck peace.”Miranda July shouts at her car’s steering wheel. With a black Sharpie, she scrawls FUCK in huge letters on the inside of her windshield. She drives. Sunlight...