In the Cut

Nov 28, 2018 — Made on a shoestring budget, Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 Detour is a landmark of film noir, a hardboiled thriller that represents the genre at its seediest and most fatalistic. But despite amassing critical acclaim and a significant cult following over the decades,...

Feb 12, 2018 — In “Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?,” a four-part essay at Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton first stakes out a position. Referring to one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous pieces, he writes: “For a hundred years now it’s been...

Dec 22, 2017 — “There are two basic types of Errol Morris film,” writes Evan Kindley in the Nation: One is the character study of an obsessive individual pursuing a difficult, perhaps impossible goal. Morris loves his Ahabs: the animal-obsessed eccentrics of Fast, Cheap...

Dec 12, 2017 — Alexander Payne skewers the absurdities of American politics in this tale of a high-school presidential campaign gone ugly.

Jun 16, 2017 — Robert Kolker “is best known for his landmark study A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman (1980), now in its fourth edition, as is his influential textbook, Film Form and Culture (1999),” writes Jonathan Kirshner for the Boston...

Feb 5, 2017 — Kirsten Johnson interrogates the thorny ethics of nonfiction filmmaking in her intriguingly elliptical blend of essay, travelogue, and memoir.

Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.

Aug 28, 2012 — The boy Quadrophenia’s Jimmy was based on (or was he?) talks to us about the mod life.

Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...

Oct 23, 2006 — The New Zealand director’s debut feature is a bridge between her tentative, probing film school works and her subsequent female character studies.