Woman of Pleasure

Aug 26, 2022 — Louise Brooks, Marguerite Duras, Lucrecia Martel, and Jacquelyn Mills headline this week’s roundup.

Jul 23, 2021 — Deep Dives In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own...

Mar 17, 2020 — Released in, or rather let loose upon, the first year of the new millennium, Spike Lee’s febrile and ferocious media satire Bamboozled—the fifteenth feature-length “joint” of a prolific career—found its writer-director in an unflinching mode and an unforgiving mood. According...

Apr 8, 2018 — Saige Walton and Nadine Boljkovac introduce the dossier “Materializing Absence” in the new issue of Screening the Past: “We start from the central premise that absence in screen media is not ‘nothing’—that absence itself is always invested with material attributes....

Jan 3, 2018 — Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, and exhibitions and film series celebrating the hundredth anniversary are already underway. Update, 1/5: Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, a Janus Films retrospective of twenty-four works, will open at New York’s Film Forum on...

Oct 23, 2012 — After winning an Oscar, John Schlesinger used his newfound artistic freedom to make a personal film in which homosexuality is treated as groundbreakingly ordinary.

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki’s drama sees sexuality as a potent anarchic force that, in its implacable selfishness, brushes aside any sort of order or discipline.

Sep 22, 2025 — The director of the documentary Celluloid Underground discusses his life as a curator, Iranian film culture, and the inherent ephemerality of cinema.

May 27, 2025 — The triumphant return of Jafar Panahi capped off what many consider to be a terrific year at Cannes.