Portrait from Life

Sep 18, 2025 — This month’s programs offer a feast of horror, including a John Carpenter retrospective and a collection of the most terrifying films of the 2000s.

Jul 3, 2024 — Pop Shakespeare, 100 years of Disney, and conversations with Isaac Julien and Steven Soderbergh are among this week’s highlights.

Jun 11, 2024 — A radically strange, postmodern adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is grounded by a sweaty, seething, meaty eroticism—a confrontational sexuality that remains bracing.

May 9, 2023 — The Austrian Film Museum pairs features by the great French directors Jacques Becker and Claude Sautet.

Feb 14, 2023 — This month’s roundup opens with an appreciation of Preston Sturges and wraps with a book launch serving donuts and damn fine coffee.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Aug 8, 2021 — This month on the Channel, dive into the films of John Huston, Jean Harlow, Josephine Baker, and other cinematic icons.

May 1, 2021 — Filmmaking, at its best, has always sought to bear witness to, and create new perspectives on, our lived realities. But no one has mined the eccentric possibilities of the cinematic medium to address the vertiginous social and cultural changes borne...

Mar 5, 2021 — Here’s an overview of what critics have been saying about this year’s winners of the Berlinale’s top awards.

Mar 5, 2021 — When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark died in 2015 at age seventy-five from myelodysplastic syndrome, she left behind a vast and varied five-decade trail of portraits and documentary pictures, collected in twenty books and dozens of exhibitions, radical in their...