The Way We Were

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

Oct 29, 2019 — Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a...

Oct 28, 2019 — This year’s Tokyo International Film Festival salutes two singular directors, both in their eighties now but still going strong.

Oct 7, 2019 — One Scene Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike has directed more than a hundred features, and almost three decades into his career he’s showing no signs of slowing down. Throughout his ferocious, often controversial body of work, he has contorted disparate genres...

Oct 4, 2019 — When I met Ann Carter in 2007 during the filming of a documentary about Hollywood producer Val Lewton, she was seventy years old, more than six decades removed from her starring role in Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People....

Sep 25, 2019 — With Polyester, his first movie to flirt with the mainstream, maverick filmmaker John Waters set out to send up the overripe Hollywood melodramas of yesteryear—but also “to make a movie that really stunk,” as he has put it. Inspired by...

Sep 4, 2019 — With their novelistic density and sexual openness, the films of French master André Téchiné introduced director Stephen Cone to a strange new world of contradictions.

Sep 3, 2019 — Early reviews of Gray’s space odyssey are strong—and even stronger for Brad Pitt.

Aug 21, 2019 — One Scene One of my absolute favorite quotes from Douglas Sirk—and he has a million of ’em—was made in reference to Magnificent Obsession. “It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness,” he said (this isn’t the quote quite...

Jul 3, 2019 — Punk has been tamed, punk has been neutered, punk has been domesticated. The album The Stooges is fifty years old this August, and the music of omnidirectional bile and antiauthoritarianism that it anticipated has been museumified, the subject of a...