The Big Shot

Jan 18, 2022 — MoMA’s festival of film preservation presents Beat poets, crown jewels, a lonely Hungarian, and a Senegalese bad boy.

Nov 16, 2021 — Starting with his first movie, in 1949, the Cantonese folk hero became a pop-culture phenomenon whose personality evolved to suit the times.

Oct 26, 2021 — Considered his first directly political film, Satyajit Ray’s 1960 masterpiece explores how the denial of self-knowledge, a void neither religion nor Western rationalism can fill, takes a toll on women in Indian society.

Jul 22, 2021 — Quentin Tarantino’s first novel and studies of Ophuls and Melville are among this month’s new and noteworthy titles.

Jul 7, 2021 — In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai—or the global art-house phenomenon they generated—without these extraordinary performers;...

May 24, 2021 — We’re reading more about Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock and about Sofia Coppola and Stanley Kubrick.

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.

Feb 9, 2021 — What does parallax mean? It is a term that English speakers are perpetually learning and always forgetting. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses: “Parallax. I never exactly understood . . . Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” In the technical sense, the word...

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

Oct 22, 2020 — 1.     Jimmy Ringo, the protagonist of the 1950 western The Gunfighter, is based on real-life nineteenth-century outlaw John Peters Ringgold, better known as Johnny Ringo. One of Tombstone, Arizona’s most notorious gunslingers, he also served as the model for the...