The Front Line

Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...

Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...

Jun 22, 2011 — Theresa Russell is attracted to the very things that repel most actors. In 1976’s The Last Tycoon, her first movie (and Elia Kazan’s last), she is unafraid of seeming to do very little. Young actresses like to show you they...

Dec 11, 2009 — This expansive tribute to the iconic Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai was first published on the Criterion Collection’s website in fall 2005, around the time of the Criterion releases of two films starring Nakadai: Kurosawa’s Ran and the less well-known samurai...

Oct 29, 2025 — In her intensely personal debut feature, the filmmaker and poet investigates the myths that have shaped South African history through a mix of archival footage, poetic remembrances, and conversations with friends and family.

Oct 18, 2024 — Names in the news this week: Bette Gordon, Robert Frank, Don Hertzfeldt, Alfonso Cuarón, Cate Blanchett, and Quentin Tarantino.

Feb 15, 2022 — Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.

Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.

Dec 6, 2024 — Richard Linklater and James Benning revisit Godard’s Breathless and Wim Wenders looks back on Paris, Texas.

Aug 12, 2024 — The great actor creates an unforgettable portrait of a man worn down by the world in Tamara Jenkins’s darkly funny and deeply moving family drama.