The Big Trail

Sep 20, 2024 — Catching up with Todd Solondz, missing Maggie Cheung, and wrapping up the summer of 2024.

Jun 7, 2019 — He is the most disarming and self-effacing of the English actors who dominated stage and screen in the middle of the twentieth century—the others were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Those fellows carried themselves like grand...

May 12, 2026 — Sorting through critics’ most-anticipated titles, catching up with interviews and profiles, and more.

Jan 28, 2025 — We’re reading about Wes Anderson and David Cronenberg and looking forward to books on David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar.

Jun 22, 2017 — The new issue of Senses of Cinema opens with a whopping dossier on Budd Boetticher (1916–2001). In his introduction, Dean Brandum notes that “in 1960, at the very moment he seemed destined for A-list status, he walked away from Hollywood,...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Jul 2, 2015 — Les Blank’s A Poem Is a Naked Person, in theaters courtesy of Janus Films, is a major rediscovery. Now playing at New York’s Film Forum before expanding to cities across the United States, including Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...