Before the Beginning

Jun 13, 2025 — Darling and Dogma are back in theaters, and Edmund White is remembered with his great essay on Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau.

May 27, 2025 — In the singular mid-1980s TV show Eternity’s Pillar, the jazz iconoclast gives viewers a chance to experience the healing powers of her music—and the intense spiritual practice that fuels it.

Apr 22, 2025 — This year’s edition spotlights work by Dea Kulumbegashvili, Alex Ross Perry, Eva Victor, and Ryan White.

Mar 25, 2025 — Set in a grimy, unglamorous version of Los Angeles, Arthur Penn’s Watergate-era neonoir tells the story of an honorable private eye acutely conscious of living in an era that is the mere shadow of a nobler past.

Mar 25, 2025 — Unfettered by the precepts of bourgeois morality and the nuclear family, the characters in Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama struggle to find happiness as they navigate love’s whims and ambiguities.

Feb 14, 2025 — The director of Down with Love talks about his favorite romantic comedies set in the great metropolis and looks back on the making of his own foray into the genre.

Jan 21, 2025 — Lynchian may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

Nov 19, 2024 — William Wyler’s adaptation of the Broadway musical celebrates the indomitability of vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, embodied by Barbra Streisand in an incandescent and remarkably vulnerable performance.

Oct 24, 2024 — The director of such classic political docudramas as On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa defied the conventions of nonfiction filmmaking with his innovative approach to collaboration and performance.

Oct 8, 2024 — Though it received dismissive reviews upon its release, this chillingly nihilistic horror film has since influenced such masters as Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Rivette with its low-budget evocation of anxiety and indeterminacy.