Undercover Angel

Oct 10, 2025 — This week: Essays on Daniel Day-Lewis, Sophie Fillières, and Miguel Gomes, a talk with Wes Anderson, and an AI experiment.

Sep 18, 2025 — No movie star was bigger in the 1970s, and he won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People. But Sundance may be his most impactful legacy.

Sep 18, 2024 — We’re reading or anticipating new books from Pedro Almodóvar, Al Pacino, Werner Herzog, and Cher.

Mar 25, 2024 — What makes a “bad” movie anyway? By surveying the bombs, disasters, and secret masterpieces (dis)honored at the Golden Raspberry Awards, we can learn much about American cinema’s prevailing standards of taste.

Oct 27, 2023 — We’re revisiting Infernal Affairs, Lisandro Alonso’s Los muertos, and some of the first reviews posted at Reverse Shot.

Aug 11, 2023 — Great as they are, there was a lot more to Hurricane Billy than The French Connection and The Exorcist.

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

Jul 16, 2021 — The spotlight this week is on Sara Driver, Jacques Tati, Bill Duke, Lizzie Borden, and Nobuhiko Obayashi.

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...