The After

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...

Apr 19, 2019 — Performances No other comedian could milk a pause for a laugh quite the way Jack Benny could on his radio program, which lasted from 1932 to 1955 and turned him into an American institution. (He also did a TV show...

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

May 30, 2017 — In his brilliantly inscrutable debut, Apichatpong Weerasethakul blends documentary authenticity with wild flights of imagination.

May 25, 2017 — The vast majority of Cannes top-prize recipients have been either European or American, which makes it all the more worthwhile to note those winners that come from historically underrepresented nations. At the 1997 ceremony, Iran’s flourishing film culture enjoyed a...

Apr 6, 2017 — Repertory PicksOn Sunday evening, Alfonso Cuarón’s sultry road movie Y tu mamá también (2001) will roll into the Wilmette Theatre in Wilmette, Illinois. After helming two Hollywood productions that focused on the process of growing up—an imaginative adaptation of the...

Mar 2, 2017 — Repertory PicksThis Friday, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee will screen French Cancan, Jean Renoir’s vibrant reimagining of belle epoque Paris. Inspired by the life of Moulin Rouge founder Charles Zidler, this 1955 musical comedy tells the story of a cabaret impresario...

Jan 30, 2017 — It wasn’t until the second half of his life that Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène dedicated himself to cinema, with his debut feature, Black Girl, premiering in 1966 when he was forty-three. Already an acclaimed novelist, Sembène had lived in France...

Sep 2, 2015 — The cuddliest of the New American Cinema auteurs of the seventies was born on this day in 1929. Hal Ashby’s output from that decade never loses its ability to astonish; bookended by two of the era’s great social-minded comedies, The...

Feb 24, 2015 — Federico Fellini’s fragmentary and picturesque tale of death and debauchery in ancient Rome is a surreal take on reality.