To Be or Not to Be

Dec 16, 1991 — Lady for a Day represented a watershed in the career of Frank Capra. The young director had been laboring at Columbia Pictures’ Poverty Row Studio, churning out 18 films in less than six years. He had moved from low-budget programmers...

Jan 28, 1991 — The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in...

Dec 2, 1990 — In Martin Scorsese’s hands, the camera is not simply a recording device, but an x-ray machine—and it shows us close-ups of the human soul.

May 31, 1990 — Isabelle Huppert shot from minor actress to full-fledged French star with a mesmerizing performance as, ironically, a young woman who is incapable of escaping anonymity. In Swiss director Claude Goretta’s elegant, beautifully observed tragedy/character study, Huppert is “Pomme,” a lovely,...

Apr 23, 1990 — Paying little attention to civilized rules of cinema, and with a bit more than one million dollars, Steven Soderbergh expresses all his hidden anxieties in this indie classic.

Mar 12, 1990 — This Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film is a classic example of how music and dance can be used to tell a story, express emotions, richly explore human relationships, subvert logic, and send us singing and skipping into the street.

Mar 6, 1989 — This black-and-white horror flick is the definitive ‘50s film about a town that won’t listen to the kids until it’s too late.

Dec 8, 2050 — By some remarkable alchemy, the modern Olympic Games and the cinema were born at nearly the same moment—between June 1894, when the first Olympic Congress was held in Paris under the inspired and visionary leadership of the French aristocrat Pierre...

May 30, 2050 — Odd Man Out, Carol Reed’s first masterpiece, introduced the theme that would shape all of his best films: a stranger’s groping quest through the labyrinth of a great city. The little French boy left to his own confused devices in...

Oct 22, 2026 — In one of his most personal films, the Oscar-winning director imbues Mary Shelley’s gothic tale with elements of family melodrama and traces of his own Catholic upbringing.