The Honest One

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...

May 21, 2020 — Judy O’Brien, a ballerina working in a burlesque show to make ends meet, has finally had enough. In the middle of an especially humiliating performance, the audience’s jeering reaches such a peak that she stops, walks down center stage, hands...

Mar 14, 2005 — The first time I put an eye behind a camera (a 16mm Bell & Howell), it was in a lunatic asylum. The head of the institution was a great big hulk of a man with a face so ravaged by...

Nov 18, 1997 — Erotic and antierotic, Crash the movie begins boldly enough with a vacantly lissome blonde (Deborah Kara Unger) dreamily opening her blouse to press a bare nipple against the enameled surface of an airplane fuselage before allowing a total stranger to...

Oct 8, 2024 — Telling a love story in three parts spanning more than twenty years, Jia offers a summing up before he turns a new page.

Oct 13, 2021 — Several of the season’s best-reviewed films arrive in the Windy City.

Jun 26, 2000 — Kevin Smith writes about his third feature as a sort of penance/valentine for the woman who made him grow up.

Aug 28, 2025 — Made for public television, this moving vérité documentary about three terminally ill cancer patients is one of the purest expressions of the director’s career-long preoccupation with human fragility.

Nov 22, 2019 — Critics are praising the French New Wave icon’s joyous and reflective final film, which hits theaters in New York this week.

May 23, 2017 — “To premiere one film at Cannes is an honor,” writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Times. “Being granted two slots in the lineup is a major distinction indeed. But for the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, the two...