The Moment

Jan 10, 2025 — This week: Eisenstein’s diaries, Godard’s artworks, Mike Leigh’s characters, and Sidney Poitier’s late work.

Dec 4, 2024 — Before she won acclaim as a pioneering director, the Hollywood icon made her name as a powerfully vivid actor who brought grit and toughness to films by such masters as Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Michael Curtiz.

Nov 22, 2024 — Powell and Pressburger, Cassavetes and Rowlands, Robert Frank, Catherine Breillat, John Waters, Babette Mangolte, Sergei Loznitsa . . .

Nov 12, 2024 — Filled with expressionistic shadows and pungent details of life in the criminal underworld, this seminal tale of money and violence was among director Howard Hawks’s favorite of his own films.

Aug 20, 2024 — In her formally daring debut feature, Martha Coolidge stages a confrontation with the subject of date rape that questions the kind of “closure” required in conventional storytelling.

Aug 12, 2024 — The great actor creates an unforgettable portrait of a man worn down by the world in Tamara Jenkins’s darkly funny and deeply moving family drama.

Jul 29, 2024 — Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.

Jul 23, 2024 — Unlike the string of early-1980s sex comedies that it superficially resembles, Paul Brickman’s debut feature fuses fierce social satire and dark, dreamy eroticism with unexpectedly rich and ambiguous results.

Jun 28, 2024 — Alain Guiraudie and Angela Schanelec discuss their new films, Albert Serra opens an exhibition, and Paul Schrader gets ranked.

May 14, 2024 — Despite the harsh critical drubbing it received upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s lurid tale of obsession and violence is now widely regarded as a masterpiece—and as a key inspiration for an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies.