One Cut of the Dead

Apr 9, 2013 — David Cronenberg and William S. Burroughs: it was a meeting of the mutant minds years in the making.

Aug 11, 2008 — Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was...

Dec 18, 2016 — Imogen Sara Smith examines the tensions between tradition and modernity reflected in two silent crime films by Yasujiro Ozu and Tomu Uchida.

Jun 17, 2014 — The brutal lessons of Vietnam remained in America’s national consciousness for a generation. September 11 gave us collective amnesia, and they’ve had to be learned again.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Apr 25, 2005 — In Andrzej Wajda’s masterful antiwar film, we see scarcely a single combat death, yet the dark radiance of doom haloes one and all.

Mar 29, 2022 — About half an hour into love jones, Theodore Witcher’s romance from 1997 starring Larenz Tate and Nia Long, the two main characters amble along a Chicago block as raindrops fall, soft but insistent. The colors are warm, naturalistic—browns, mauves, and...

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

May 16, 2023 — Inspired by golden-age monster movies and the story of a real-life mass murderer, Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature evokes the psychic dread of America in the 1960s, a decade defined by long-distance and increasingly high-profile gun violence.

Sep 16, 2022 — The trailblazing and idiosyncratic filmmaker discusses her two newly restored shorts, her childhood in Detroit, and her decision to leave the movie industry behind.