Dance of the Dead

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

Apr 25, 2023 — Steve McQueen’s monumental, five-film portrait of London’s West Indian community is a howl of endorsement for political resistance and a vivid indictment of institutional malaise.

Jan 9, 2023 — The films in the Criterion Channel collection Free Jazz chronicle the development of a deeply experimental music that has baffled and enthralled listeners in equal measure.

Mar 11, 2022 — Deep Dives There’s an entire realm of children’s entertainment that survives mostly on the margins of collective consciousness. The average person is unlikely to know Michael Sporn’s name, but if they are of a certain age, they almost certainly have...

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...

Jan 29, 2018 — New York. The Metrograph’s “essential series Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories gets its title from a 1980 documentary by Chantal Akerman called Dis-Moi, which is one of the earliest filmed works of oral history about the Holocaust,” writes Richard...

Sep 4, 2017 — “Lebanon director Samuel Maoz went in a risky direction by making a film as different and daring as Foxtrot,” writes Jay Weissberg for Variety, “and his boldness pays off in ways that make one reach for superlatives. Not content to...

Aug 15, 2017 — Walter Matthau solidified his reputation as a formidable comedic force in this delightful Cold War espionage romp.

Mar 7, 2017 — With his unique blend of British realism and romantic fatalism, director Andrew Haigh exposes the quiet desperation at the heart of a long marriage.

Mar 29, 2016 — Les Blank’s long-lost documentary revels in the trippy, eccentric world of and surrounding Tulsa Sound pioneer Leon Russell, transforming what might have been a standard concert movie into a genuine work of art.