The Short Game

Nov 12, 2015 — Michael Haneke’s politically prescient drama explores the tenuous, uneasy connections between inhabitants of a globally interwoven Europe.

Sep 8, 1998 — Paul Verhoeven’s breakthrough American film gleefully satirizes the Reagan era’s pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatization.

May 20, 1991 — In 1941, director Frank Capra was at the peak of his profession with a string of critical and popular successes behind him—next would come his adaptation of a farcical and macabre stage play.

Jun 11, 2024 — A radically strange, postmodern adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is grounded by a sweaty, seething, meaty eroticism—a confrontational sexuality that remains bracing.

Jan 7, 2021 — That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) is often referred to as Luis Buñuel’s “testament” work, the apotheosis of his remarkable career as a filmmaker. It perfectly blends the type of outrageous surrealism he pioneered in the late twenties and early...

Jun 15, 2009 — With the arrival of this film, cinema catapulted to the front line of a cultural advance guard that sought to undermine the intractable mass taste promoted by Hollywood, television, and the Brill Building.

Aug 9, 2022 — An indie pioneer whose life was cut tragically short, the Texas filmmaker found grace in the tedium of repressive small-town existence.

Sep 17, 2020 — Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time and Sean Durkin’s The Nest have A.V. Club writers revisiting the films they’ve made with Josh Mond.

Mar 17, 2008 — Francesco Rosi’s film is a painstakingly documented reconstruction of the nefarious relationships between the Mafia, banditry, and economic and political power in Sicily between 1943 and 1950.

Mar 20, 2024 — Ryan Clarke and S*an D. Henry-Smith—two curators behind New York City’s premier Black electronic music festival—talk about the films they selected for Radical Dreams, Underground Sounds, a collection now playing on the Criterion Channel.