The New Year That Never Came

Mar 17, 2025 — Headlining this month’s roundup are Joan Didion, Merle Oberon, and Charlie Chaplin.

Feb 19, 2025 — Gus Van Sant’s lyrical exploration of addiction and faith—adapted from an autobiographical novel by James Fogle—influenced cinematic drug depictions throughout the nineties and helped to initiate a wave of American independent filmmaking.

Jan 31, 2022 — Movies are about looking, and no one involved in the making of a film is more directly responsible for the frames we look at than a cinematographer, or director of photography. Together with the director, the cinematographer shapes the visual...

Nov 30, 2021 — Lost films are not the only tragedy of the silent age. It’s time that we counted up all the forgotten stories, and the overlooked connections as well. The truth is that lost films and lost memories can’t be separated. One...

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...

Sep 30, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 Pixote (1980), subtitled A lei do mais fraco (The Law of the Weakest), a hard-hitting tale of urban street children and their daily battle for survival in brutal conditions, was the Argentine-born Brazilian...

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

Mar 6, 2020 — Above photo: © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLCIn America, black musical genius has never been in short supply, though it hasn’t always been recognized or fairly compensated. Even a casual glance at the résumé of formally trained composer, producer, and arranger...

Mar 11, 2019 — It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of watching a Khalik Allah film to intuit that he’s a photographer. Over the course of just two documentary features, the thirty-four-year-old, New York–bred artist has developed an instantly recognizable style at...

Jul 30, 2018 — At a time when women were rarely seen behind the camera, Babette Mangolte created a bold, distinctive aesthetic with a mix of slow rhythms and hauntingly static compositions.