The Pickup

Dec 28, 2014 — In person, Sam was a blunt-nosed nonconformist, small of stature but forever leading with his Cuban cigar.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles’s feature debut riffs on the French New Wave to tell a love story that portrays interracial intimacy and unflinchingly confronts the distortions of racism.

Nov 27, 2008 — Despite Samuel Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, his twenty-first feature was the first to suffer outright suppression.

Sep 13, 2004 — About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life....

Jan 19, 2017 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.

Nov 5, 2014 — A review of the American auteur’s posthumously published novel

Dec 29, 2008 — It is a good time to belong to the cult of Fuller. Those of us who consider ourselves members never forget our moment of induction. Some enlisted when his films first hit the screen—lucky enough to catch The Steel Helmet...

Jul 16, 2025 — Opening in New York this week, the program is heading next to Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver.

Nov 10, 2023 — Black mothers’ stories come around again, Matt Wolf probes the archives, and Lizzie Borden conjures the streets of mid-1980s New York.

Apr 27, 2023 — The critic and filmmaker has put together a series that celebrates “a New York of the collective imagination.”