The Brain

Dec 19, 2025 — This week: Kubrick conspiracies, Malickian movies, Spike Lee’s musical moments, and a talk with Rebecca Hall.

Oct 24, 2025 — We’re revisiting work by Ken Russell, Chantal Akerman, Billy Wilder, and Abel Ferrara.

Oct 8, 2025 — We remember an artist, teacher, and filmmaker who unleashed realms of depth from two-dimensional images.

Aug 28, 2025 — Made for public television, this moving vérité documentary about three terminally ill cancer patients is one of the purest expressions of the director’s career-long preoccupation with human fragility.

Dec 10, 2024 — In this brilliant adaptation, Joel and Ethan Coen find a kindred spirit in novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose abiding themes—including destiny, the American West, and the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct—mirror their own.

Jun 21, 2024 — We open with an Italian neorealist classic, steer through ’70s-era paranoia, and wrap with a blast of gnarly rock ’n’ roll.

Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.

Jul 19, 2021 — When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously...

May 28, 2019 — Songbook Some songs are so beautiful that it takes six or seven or fifty listens before you really hear the words. High on the list of the greatest American songwriters, Jerome Kern crafted many such melodies: perfect enough to momentarily...

Oct 23, 2018 — Brian De Palma found his home in the psychological thriller with this chilling tale of murder, which twists genre conventions to investigate the perils of looking and the pitfalls of subjectivity.