Waking Life

Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...

Aug 26, 2015 — Filmmaker Keith Gordon has directed the features The Chocolate War (1988), A Midnight Clear (1992), Mother Night (1996), Waking the Dead (2000), and The Singing Detective (2003), along with multiple episodes of the series Fargo, Homeland, The Leftovers, The Killing,...

Sep 8, 1998 — In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...

Dec 17, 2025 — This January, savor multiple levels of nostalgia with a survey of ’90s cinema’s riffs on the ’70s, or turn a new page with a collection of films about dreamers seeking fresh starts in life.

Dec 16, 2025 — Paul Reubens’s iconic character comes to cinematic life in this collaboration with director Tim Burton, who creates an on-screen world that evokes the unbridled joy and overwhelming terror of childhood.

Jul 21, 2009 — Jean-Luc Godard’s essay follows twenty-four hours in Juliette’s life, beginning and ending in the evening in the apartment she shares with her husband and two young children.

Nov 26, 2001 — Peter Weir’s first film to be released in America insists on the tangible power of spiritual life.

May 27, 2026 — Is it possible to look without trying to grasp the object of one’s gaze? Traditional ethnographic documentaries, much like the written ethnographies that preceded them, have attempted to explain a given culture to those who don’t belong to it, assuming...

Nov 25, 2025 — Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, Stanley Kubrick’s final film is a deeply personal examination of the fragility of marriage and the destructive power of sexual fantasy.

Oct 16, 2025 — This month, join us for a Thanksgiving feast of some of the movies’ most memorable family reunions, or delve into the dark alleyways of noir mysteries built around protagonists tormented by amnesia, memory holes, and drunken blackouts.