The Message

Apr 16, 2020 — Performances If Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-sixth president, continues to inspire a morbid fascination in some of us, the reasons for this extend beyond the obviously exceptional aspects of his career—his reelection in 1972, one of the largest landslide victories...

Jul 15, 2014 — Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens; it was also...

Apr 6, 1993 — Robert Altman’s darkly witty, gleefully close-to-bone satire of Hollywood is also a return to the infinitely sly and supple virtuosity that marked his great work of the ‘70s.

Mar 9, 2026 — The comprehensive retrospective can be a daunting prospect, but programmer David Schwartz has spotlit five essential features.

Oct 7, 2025 — The mysterious new feature from the director of Bait and Enys Men stars George MacKay and Callum Turner.

May 20, 2019 — While a few find the family drama heavy-handed, most critics are enthusiastically cheering on Loach’s latest competition entry.

Oct 10, 2017 — Two singing mermaid sisters take 1980s Poland by storm in this extravagantly mounted musical-horror hybrid.

Aug 8, 2017 — This underappreciated highlight of Michael Curtiz’s filmography grapples with postwar disillusionment and marital strife through the prism of a daylight noir.

May 17, 2016 — Juxtaposing a vision of a stark, primitive existence on a remote Japanese island with that country’s vast twentieth-century modernization, Kaneto Shindo reveals Japan’s postwar paradoxes and makes a case for its essential, immutable character.

Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.