The Empire Strikes Back

May 19, 2026 — “My history’s burning up out here,” Ned Racine (William Hurt) tells his lover in the opening minutes of Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut, Body Heat (1981). Ned, a small-time attorney and local roué in his South Florida beach town, recognizes the...

Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.

Jun 21, 2017 — At the Film Stage, Jordan Raup reports that Claire Denis will begin production on her science fiction feature High Life next month. Starring Robert Pattinson, Patricia Arquette, and Mia Goth, High Life will be Denis’s English-language debut. She’ll be working...

Apr 7, 2017 — Filmmaker Brock DeShane pays heartfelt tribute to Jack H. Harris, the late cult-horror maestro who produced low-budget sensations like The Blob and Equinox.

Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda It’s the other famous shot in The Gleaners and I (2000) of Agnès Varda’s reaching hands. Not the one she said was taught around the world as the heart of her documentary-making, where, in...

Mar 17, 2026 — In her first and only theatrical feature, director Lynne Littman presents an unbearably intimate vision of apocalypse, focusing on the effects of a nuclear blast on one suburban American family.

Dec 29, 2022 — Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Catherine Breillat, Michael Mann, Christian Petzold, David Fincher . . .

May 8, 2020 — The opening and closing credits in a film are a form of housekeeping, fulfilling a legal obligation to compile the names of cast and crew who made the final product possible. Visionary designer Saul Bass saw the aesthetic potential in...

Dec 12, 2013 — A beloved filmmaker in India, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak digs into his region’s traumatic history in this epic melodrama.

Aug 24, 2010 — Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) was first and foremost a star vehicle for Emil Jannings, the internationally known, Swiss-born actor, who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures. During his two and a half...