A Moment of Romance

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.

Nov 5, 2021 — A teenage girl looks on with both envy and disapproval as her mother shimmies on the dance floor in the arms of a lover. “Beautiful,” observes a friend. “I know,” says the daughter, bitterly, before falling asleep in her nanny’s...

May 11, 2021 — When Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, in the summer of 1982, I was almost exactly the same age as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton, getting ready to start my sophomore year in high school. Like Stacy’s world-weary older...

Aug 26, 2019 — In the first twenty-four features he directed, between 1925 and 1939, Alfred Hitchcock —always working closely with his wife Alma Reville (variously credited for assistant direction, screenplay, and continuity)—evolved from apprenticeship to technical mastery to an exuberant flowering that made...

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...

Apr 19, 2018 — With a mix of improvisation, balletic physicality, and slapstick humor, Hollywood master Leo McCarey crafted the most sublime of screwball comedies.

May 23, 2017 — In one of the first major films to confront the contemporary refugee crisis in Europe, Jacques Audiard brings a genre-busting approach to an explosive subject.

May 19, 2014 — As in his other films, the world of Abbas Kiarostami’s latest is one of simulation, not-quite-realness, and unexpected tenderness.

Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.

May 21, 2013 — It’s tough to tell where reality ends and fiction begins in Haskell Wexler’s deft chronicle of a turbulent era.