The Road Back

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

May 23, 2018 — About halfway through Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (2016), Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) finds himself in a patch of woods in the middle of the night, crying. It’s a surprisingly vulnerable moment for a protagonist who is usually all business. We’re...

May 30, 2017 — In his brilliantly inscrutable debut, Apichatpong Weerasethakul blends documentary authenticity with wild flights of imagination.

Dec 26, 2016 — PerformancesTraveling through the subterranean portals of Videodrome like an introverted wraith, Deborah Harry carries herself with the wry, burned-out, but still titillated instincts of a voyager buying a one-way ticket for the outer limits. A vivid, smallish part can either...

Jul 13, 2015 — “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer,...

Nov 25, 2014 — More than just observational, Les Blank’s sensual documentaries are personal and participatory celebrations of American culture.

Dec 30, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin’s comedy has a secret ingredient that has bound us to him forever.

Dec 10, 2013 — Djibril Diop Mambety’s Senegalese masterwork is remarkable for both its technical audacity and its postcolonialist expressionism.

Jan 8, 2013 — The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The...

Mar 27, 2012 — Noël Coward and David Lean created a patriotic diptych with their first two films: In Which We Serve, from 1942, about the bravery and sacrifice of British sailors and those who love them, and the 1944 This Happy Breed, on...