The Men

Dec 4, 1995 — While Carol Reed’s psychological noir is the most compassionate of movies, it’s a poetic summary of twentieth century harshness—of what can be called the inhuman condition.

Jun 25, 1989 — A thoroughgoing investigation of the terms “bravery” and “cowardice,” Stanley Kubrick’s early work offers far more than a mere “anti-war” statement, paring with almost surgical precision to the heart of the fear, hubris and mendacity that keep the war machine...

Apr 10, 1989 — Two years after The Horse’s Mouth director Ronald Neame cast Alec Guinness in this film, based on a book by James Kennaway.

May 26, 2026 — Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female...

Apr 14, 2026 — Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is a film about fear. That may not entirely jibe with its reputation as a biblical parody, but it might be the movie’s secret strength—why it continues to strike a nerve today. Many of...

Sep 10, 2024 — Andrew Haigh explores loss and queer loneliness in this exquisite, twilit tangle of lives and loves separated by space, time, and personal defenses.

Sep 9, 2022 — James Wong Howe was a fighter, and he learned how to be one over the course of a turbulent upbringing. Born Wong Tung Jim in 1899, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the man who would become one of the...

Aug 26, 2022 — In a pivotal early scene in this baseball classic, director Ron Shelton mischievously uses two contrasting rock tunes to comment on disparate versions of masculinity.

Apr 19, 2022 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable deploys barbed humor and surreal flourishes to depict class solidarity and human kindness in postwar Italy.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles takes aim at Hollywood’s way of representing race in this blistering satire about a white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned Black overnight.