Land of the Free

Apr 6, 2018 — Angela Schanelec’s films “represent the most innovative use of ‘conventional’ editing in narrative cinema since Pialat who, along with Bresson, has been a clear influence,” writes Michael Sicinski for the Notebook. “Schanelec’s contribution is what we might call the ‘epistemological...

Feb 6, 2018 — “A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for...

Apr 14, 2015 — Preston Sturges revealed a lot about himself and the movie business in this hilarious and socially committed comedy.

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

May 19, 2026 — “My history’s burning up out here,” Ned Racine (William Hurt) tells his lover in the opening minutes of Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut, Body Heat (1981). Ned, a small-time attorney and local roué in his South Florida beach town, recognizes the...

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films Come on now, honey sugarYou know your baby loveYou know just the other dayI was gonna take you to go see a movieSweet Sweetback . . . Stevie Wonder, “Sweet Little Girl,” 1972 We went...

Mar 29, 2019 — When Carlos Reygadas’s debut film, Japón, came out in 2002, my generation was just starting to drive cars, smoke weed, use contraceptives. A movie ticket at the Cineteca Nacional still cost only twenty pesos then if you showed your student...

Dec 4, 2012 — Misunderstood by Hollywood, embraced by critics, this fatalistic fantasy remains Terry Gilliam’s ultimate trip.

Feb 6, 2024 — Tanaka Toshihiko’s first film launches a projected trilogy of stories set on the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

Jul 2, 2015 — Repertory PicksAmong Dustin Hoffman’s indelible cinematic creations are The Graduate’s awkward Benjamin Braddock, Midnight Cowboy’s apoplectic Ratzo Rizzo, and Rain Man’s autistic Raymond Babbit. But nothing in this chameleon’s oeuvre compares to his Dorothy Michaels, the female alter ego invented...