The Lift

Dec 19, 2019 — Lists (of course), but also philosophical surveys, biographies, and coffee table books are featured in this month’s round.

Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.

Oct 23, 2024 — This once-maligned horror film is an unsparing exploration of sexual violence, remarkably centered on a complex, fully realized female protagonist, played courageously by Barbara Hershey.

Nov 26, 2019 — Bette Davis gets the first laugh in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), and a little over two hours later, she gets the last laugh too. The film opens at the dinner for something called the Sarah Siddons Award...

Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.

Jan 22, 2026 — A singular achievement in Arab film history, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s sweeping political epic is a memorial to the lives lost in the struggle for Algerian independence.

Feb 19, 2026 — In more than forty nonfiction features, he tried, as he said, “to create dramatic structures out of ordinary experience.”

Dec 10, 2019 — Rock music, as director Wim Wenders once joked in an interview, offered to him and other Germans of his generation the “only alternative to Beethoven.” There is likely as much truth as hyper­­bole in the statement; considering the role that...

Feb 13, 2019 — The utterly delightful new film is the ninety-year-old artist’s guide to her films, photography, and visual art.

Nov 7, 2017 — A haughty socialite is torn between the affections of three men in George Cukor’s blissful comedy of manners.