Once More

Oct 23, 2018 — Brian De Palma found his home in the psychological thriller with this chilling tale of murder, which twists genre conventions to investigate the perils of looking and the pitfalls of subjectivity.

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...

Feb 21, 2012 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only work of science fiction, World on a Wire (1973) is surely one of the most obscure items among the forty-odd titles that constitute his filmography. Originally a two-part miniseries broad­cast on West German television, it had...

Sep 21, 2010 — This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared in the original 2004 Criterion DVD release of Charade. Stanley Donen’s Charade occupies a special place among sixties thrillers. In an era of spy films resplendent with macho-driven eroticism (the...

Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.

Dec 4, 2017 — One of the most anticipated highlights of lists and awards season is David Ehrlich’s spectacularly edited video countdown of his favorite films of the year. Today sees the 2017 edition that he’s been teasing on Twitter finally go live, and...

Jun 19, 2024 — A masterpiece from the golden age of Mexican cinema, Emilio Fernández’s film is a prime example of the cabaretera film, an offshoot of the popular “prostitute melodrama” genre.

Nov 21, 2023 — What stuck with me most after watching La cérémonie (1995) for the first time was the chewing gum.It’s not the scene most often cited in discussions of this late-career classic from French thriller master Claude Chabrol. Don’t get me wrong:...

Aug 31, 2023 — With the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes on, the spotlight this fall will be on the directors.

Feb 8, 2022 — This year’s round has given us plenty of firsts (and seconds).