Never Back Down

Dec 15, 2023 — Pedro Almodóvar looks back, Roy Andersson empathizes, and Alice Diop addresses the state of cinema.

Jan 3, 2023 — With lists, polls, and remembrances, we look back once again to the year that was.

Apr 6, 2022 — A playfully philosophical drama, My American Uncle has been largely forgotten, yet it is the most down-to-earth of the French master’s exhilarating engagements with modernist aesthetics.

Jan 1, 2022 — Ring in the new year with the French New Wave, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and a look back at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Apr 15, 2021 — Catherine Breillat and Todd Field are getting back behind the camera, while Scorsese and Spielberg forge ahead with their latest projects.

Nov 11, 2020 — Claire Denis When Robert Pattinson tested positive for COVID-19 in September, Warner Bros. shut down the production of Matt Reeves’s The Batman for a couple of months. Shooting has since resumed, but Claire Denis’s schedule has been thrown off. She’d...

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

Apr 2, 2019 — Mike Leigh’s endless fascination with human behavior is palpable in every one of the films he’s made over the course of his nearly fifty-year career. With an acute sensitivity to rhythm, character, and setting, he extracts extraordinary moments from the...

Sep 8, 2018 — The star of over a hundred movies wielded his laid-back charisma to conquer the box office throughout the 1970s.