Life in Shadows

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

May 8, 2018 — In his uncharacteristic final masterpiece, the great Hollywood melodramatist Frank Borzage approaches the shadowy violence of film noir with his unique brand of romanticism.

Oct 14, 2014 — What happens offscreen is as important as what’s on- in John Ford’s subtle, elegiac take on the Wyatt Earp–Doc Holliday story.

Jul 21, 2025 — Summer offers new biographies and memoirs, expansively big ideas, and more than a few curious fictions.

Oct 15, 2024 — This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.

Feb 18, 2022 — This week we’re celebrating pioneers of queer cinema and reading about Melville, Menelik Shabazz, Patrick Wang, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Dec 10, 2021 — This week sees new issues from New York, Cineaste, Film Quarterly, and the Brooklyn Rail.

May 2, 2019 — When I first saw My Brilliant Career, when it was released in New York in 1980, I was ignorant of director “Gill” Armstrong. I assumed she was a man, because at the time I could count the female directors I...

Jan 22, 2019 — Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside...

Jan 24, 2018 — The forty-seventh edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam opens today and runs through February 4. Over a month ago now, we started tracking the lineup, which the IFFR unveiled bit by bit every few days, culminating with the publication...