The Harrowing

May 22, 2019 — Cannes 2019 While politics has never been a stranger to the Cannes Film Festival lineup, this year’s offerings have proven to be even more charged than usual. And one of the more lively and notable premieres on the Croisette so...

Feb 5, 2019 — Shame (1968) is one of the great neglected films from Ingmar Bergman’s midcareer creative explosion. It builds on and surpasses the two Bergman films that immediately preceded it: the avant-garde milestone Persona (1966) and the surreal shocker Hour of the...

Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...

Jun 29, 2017 — Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel In a Lonely Place, “about a World War II flyboy, now a serial rapist and murderer, would have violated just about every commandment in the Production Code,” had Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt stuck...

Sep 9, 2016 — To celebrate the release of this revelatory self-portrait that weaves together footage from Johnson’s twenty-five-year career as a globetrotting documentary cinematographer, we’ve compiled a selection of writing about the film.

Nov 4, 2015 — In the midst of a tumultuous period in his life and career, Ingmar Bergman made one of his most ebullient comedies.

Oct 25, 2013 — "I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line...

Apr 21, 2008 — There’s an irony to the fact that Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu lived his life as a bachelor, for he made some of the world’s most insightful, lived-in, and emotionally authentic films about marriage and parenthood.

Aug 13, 2007 — Cría cuervos . . . , Carlos Saura's political and psychological masterpiece, was shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, and premiered in Madrid's Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976, forty years after...

Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...