The Crowd

May 26, 2023 — This year saw the return of Michel Gondry, a strong showing from New York, and a bittersweet love story from Georgia.

Jun 8, 2022 — The Indian director, actor, and producer’s early death has enshrined him as a tragic icon in public memory. But there is more to his art than misery.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

May 23, 2018 — In some of his most elaborately choreographed set pieces, the silent-comedy master confronted the chaos of the world with balletic grace and rhythmic precision.

Feb 6, 2018 — “A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for...

Feb 1, 2018 — G. W. Pabst’s breathlessly paced reimagining of a mine disaster makes an urgent plea for international cooperation in the post–World War I era.

Mar 26, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin manages to make a ruthless murderer likable in his brilliant satire of middle-class morality.

Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...

Apr 14, 2020 — Whether or not you believe it is the greatest year of all for the Hollywood studio system, the wonder of 1939 is the sheer depth of its bench. On a ten-movie best-picture ballot, the Oscars found no room to nominate...

Dec 2, 2010 — Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) opens in a shiny space: nuns breeze past; a woman in a white uniform clacks through, bearing towels; a baby cries. People wait. The feeling is “hospital.” A second woman in white delivers towels, and we...