Down By Law

Jun 29, 2022 — A fresh round on biographies and studies of filmmakers and actors as well as a few novel ideas and critical collections.

Sep 16, 2019 — In a dark moment, Laurence Olivier often reached for a laugh. His lofty, somewhat burdensome reputation as his century’s greatest dramatic actor belies the mercurial essence of his craft, which was to seize upon the humanity in each of his...

Apr 17, 2013 — Four of the great Japanese director’s lesser-known, early films show the coming into being of a political artist.

Sep 26, 2025 — One of the most provocative subgenres of 1970s exploitation cinema, nunsploitation explores the collision of sex and religious dogma through stories of desperately horny women of the cloth.

May 29, 2024 — This Oscar-winning courtroom drama revolves around one of director Justine Triet’s most complex creations—a high-achieving female protagonist whose motivations remain tenaciously mysterious.

May 25, 2021 — In Edmund Goulding’s gritty cult classic, Tyrone Power casts off his matinee-idol image to play a conniving carnival barker on the flipside of the American dream.

Feb 12, 2019 — In a stark, forbidding prison, a nun ascends a staircase, framed by vertical bars, and walks down a corridor, unlocking cell doors. Women start coming out; two of them quarrel. Smoking on her bunk, one inmate sighs when told she...

Sep 9, 2022 — James Wong Howe was a fighter, and he learned how to be one over the course of a turbulent upbringing. Born Wong Tung Jim in 1899, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the man who would become one of the...

Jun 15, 2021 — These landmark documentary portraits of intergenerational struggle in Seattle expose social horrors while also revealing the humanity of their subjects.

Jun 12, 2018 — Among the six movies Lino Brocka directed between 1974 and ’76, there were three landmark works that changed the course of his career and that of Philippine cinema: Weighed but Found Wanting (1974), Manila in the Claws of Light (1975),...