In Public

Aug 2, 2019 — 1. Spike Lee was inspired to write Do the Right Thing by what is now known as the Howard Beach incident. On December 20, 1986, a mob of twelve angry white men chased down and beat three black men who...

Jun 10, 2019 — The growing presence of unabashed queerness in contemporary culture makes the past seem comparatively drained of it. But it was always there. There’s often a queer history that lies beneath our accepted mainstream hetero narratives. When excavated, these histories can...

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

May 30, 2019 — The star of classics directed by Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Kinugasa, Ozu, Ichikawa, and Teshigahara was ninety-five.

Jan 22, 2019 — Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside...

Jan 8, 2019 — A few lingering observations on the films of 2018 from Slate’s Movie Club, the New York Times, and more.

Nov 28, 2018 — Made on a shoestring budget, Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 Detour is a landmark of film noir, a hardboiled thriller that represents the genre at its seediest and most fatalistic. But despite amassing critical acclaim and a significant cult following over the decades,...

Aug 26, 2018 — Tomás Gutiérrez Alea brought cinema to the center of Cuban society with this richly ambiguous portrait of postrevolutionary Havana.

Jun 11, 2018 — Building on a rich lineage of gothic fairy tales and noirish melodramas, this lavishly stylized curio has an ominous beauty all its own.

Feb 13, 2018 — With the scrappiest of means, George A. Romero created not only a landmark of independent cinema but also an indelible portrait of America as hellscape.