The Lift

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Oct 27, 2003 — Attuned to the ineffable weirdness and crushing mundanity of workplace paranoia, Steven Soderbergh’s film finds anger and sorrow in the way we brutalize our means of communication

Aug 19, 2002 — René Clair’s musical comedy comprises a window on a particular lost black and white neverworld—bouncy with melody, soaked in spring light, wistful about the conflicted relationship between serendipity and love.

Oct 19, 2023 — Her entrance in the film is impossible to forget. She swings into the scene to serve a patron some coffee, holding a cup in one hand and a book in the other. Her diamond-shaped face is obscured, but her aura...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Jan 5, 2016 — Toshiya Fujita’s two-film saga set exuberant, manga-inspired martial-arts choreography against a backdrop of a Japanese society in transition to unfold a vivid tale of epic vengeance.

Jun 21, 2012 — The following interview with actor Ruth Gordon originally appeared in the April 4, 1971, edition of the New York Times. “Have ya gotta angle for the story?” The accent—part New England hayseed, part Dead-End Kid—is unmistakable. It belongs to Ruth...

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...