1979 in film

Mar 9, 2026 — The comprehensive retrospective can be a daunting prospect, but programmer David Schwartz has spotlit five essential features.

Feb 18, 2026 — One of the most versatile and committed actors in cinema, Duvall was also an accomplished writer and director.

Sep 17, 2025 — One of the most influential comedies of the 1980s, Rob Reiner’s rock-and-roll satire is a remarkably authentic, lived-in portrait of musicians, their egotism, and the industry that feeds off their stardom.

May 20, 2025 — Set in the dying days of the 1960s, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors is a triumph of screenwriting and a brilliant showcase for then-unknown stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.

May 1, 2025 — The director of Sambizanga is celebrated with a full retrospective in New York and a free evening of screenings in Los Angeles.

Apr 14, 2025 — The director of Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was ninety-four.

Mar 31, 2025 — Steeped in theater history, Shinoda infused centuries-old tales with twentieth-century dynamism.

Feb 18, 2025 — In her mainstream breakthrough, director Joan Micklin Silver envisions New York City through the eyes of a complicated, searching woman trying to figure out her place in the world.

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

Jul 29, 2024 — Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.