Faithful

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.

Jan 17, 2025 — Featured this week are Frank Capra, Michael Roemer, John Ford, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Oct 15, 2024 — This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.

Sep 25, 2024 — At a time when women were understood to be the primary audience for movies, Hollywood studios built vehicles for actresses that doubled as showcases for the industry’s many brilliant female screenwriters.

Jul 23, 2024 — Chen Kaige’s sweeping epic chronicles the history of twentieth-century China through the story of two childhood friends, contrasting the unchanging traditions of their Beijing-opera milieu with the nation’s swift and turbulent transformation.

Jun 25, 2024 — Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

Apr 16, 2024 — Unfolding in elaborately choreographed long takes, this sublime adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance captures the weight of time and the mood of fascism with a haunting palpability.

Mar 25, 2024 — What makes a “bad” movie anyway? By surveying the bombs, disasters, and secret masterpieces (dis)honored at the Golden Raspberry Awards, we can learn much about American cinema’s prevailing standards of taste.

Aug 11, 2023 — Great as they are, there was a lot more to Hurricane Billy than The French Connection and The Exorcist.

Jun 23, 2023 — Critics rank political movies and revisit the work of Fassbinder, Pasolini, and Juliet Berto.