On War

Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.

Aug 27, 2012 — There are disturbing movie scenes, and then there are disturbing movie scenes. The following, from Norman Mailer’s Maidstone, is not for the faint of heart. The 1970 film is the ultimate example of Mailer’s cinematic philosophy, which held that a...

Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.

Jul 19, 2012 — I want to start with my favorite story about Carole Lombard. She began her career in Hollywood in her teens and, as we know, was very attractive. She found herself hounded by the wolves of Tinseltown but came up with...

Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...

Jul 11, 2012 — Performances Of all the stultified suburban folks in The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s diamond-sharp adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about two Connecticut families in the early seventies, Sigourney Weaver’s Janey Carver might appear the least in need of attention. Most...

Jun 27, 2012 — The writer and director Nora Ephron, who died yesterday at age seventy-one, was an icon in an industry dominated by men. Earlier this year, for the Criterion release of Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, Ephron and Dunham sat down for a...

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.

Jun 21, 2012 — Austin film programmer Jesse Trussell tells us about what goes into curating this long-running series.

Jun 19, 2012 — Steven Soderbergh delivers a poignant psychological portrait of the late Spalding Gray in this deftly structured documentary.