The Clovehitch Killer

Mar 7, 2019 — As one of the leading figures of the L.A. Rebellion, a loosely defined movement of filmmakers who were pioneering new forms of African-American on-screen representation in the 1960s and ’70s, Charles Burnett has long been heavily associated with Los Angeles....

Mar 1, 2019 — Claire Simon begins her new documentary The Competition with a shot of young filmmakers chatting outside the locked gates of La Fémis, the most prestigious film school in France, patiently awaiting an opportunity to be judged by a panel of...

Feb 25, 2019 — Songbook Pace Lou Reed, nobody’s life is saved by rock and roll in Cold Water. This in spite of  its young characters’ relentless pursuit of it, in both musical and metaphysical forms. Made in 1994, set in 1972, Olivier Assayas’s...

Feb 21, 2019 — Repertory Picks In his first decade in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock landed on the perfect balance between swooning romance and intricately layered suspense with Notorious, a film whose moral ambiguity hinted at the increasingly complex material of his subsequent masterpieces. Propelled...

Feb 11, 2019 — Renowned as an actors’ filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman directed some of cinema’s greatest performances, many of them by a highly talented troupe of frequent collaborators, including Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and others. But even amid the...

Jan 25, 2019 — Gifted with crack timing and a caustic wit, Elaine May first came up as an improv comedian in the late fifties, forming the popular satirical tandem of Nichols and May with her college classmate Mike Nichols. By the time May...

Jan 11, 2019 — With 24 Frames, the film that would become his last, Abbas Kiarostami made one of the most conceptually daring—and painstaking—works of his career. Over the course of several years, the Iranian filmmaker hunkered down with visual effects supervisor Ali Kamali...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Dec 17, 2018 — Euzhan Palcy’s searing 1989 drama A Dry White Season—an indictment of South Africa’s racist apartheid-era regime that made its own mark on history, becoming the first Hollywood studio film directed by a black woman—owes much of its power to its...

Dec 11, 2018 — Note: The terms black and white were part of the way racial categories were referred to in South Africa under apartheid. Other terms, like nonwhite and non-European, were also used to mark racial segregation. In the following essay, the term...