On the Beat

Jul 27, 2022 — Beat the heat with our extensive survey of Chinese representation in American film as well as tributes to Yaphet Kotto, David Gulpilil, and Myrna Loy.

Apr 23, 2021 — This week we’re reading A. S. Hamrah on the contenders for this year’s Oscars and Ben Hecht on the state of Hollywood in 1938.

Oct 9, 2019 — The Internet’s hardcore feline obsession may seem harmless, but is there something darker at play behind the millions of memes and GIFs it generates, or the eager crowds who gather to meet online animal celebrities like Grumpy Cat (R.I.P.)? In...

Jun 23, 2017 — Reporting on last year’s edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato for Film Comment, Dan Sullivan called the festival “a rare beast indeed: a one-week, primarily repertory film festival, mind-bogglingly dense with new restorations, legendary prints, discoveries and rediscoveries, canonical works presented...

Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...

Jul 23, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.

Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.

Aug 10, 2017 — Ian Buruma, who’ll become the new editor of the New York Review of Books next month, has a piece in the new issue on The Memory of Justice, “the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is...

Apr 12, 2017 — British director Jack Clayton elicited landmark performances from a host of great ladies of the cinema, including Maggie Smith, Deborah Kerr, and Anne Bancroft.

Oct 30, 2000 — Perry Henzell’s reggae-infused outlaw film reflects the political climate of the times, when anti-government movements were sweeping America and the world.