Train of Life

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.

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.

Apr 15, 2024 — Eleven first and second features are slated to premiere, seven of them in competition.

Jan 9, 2023 — The films in the Criterion Channel collection Free Jazz chronicle the development of a deeply experimental music that has baffled and enthralled listeners in equal measure.

Jun 22, 2021 — This month’s roundup of new and noteworthy titles opens with “a counterfactual history of the movies.”

Jan 4, 1988 — The Secret Agent (1936) came to life in the prime of Alfred Hitchcock’s British period. It arrived between the popular triumph of The 39 Steps and the box-office rejection of Sabotage, a more daringly downbeat work. Secret Agent partakes of...

Aug 26, 2025 — Alice Wu’s feature debut is a romantic comedy in which the most compelling relationship is the one between a young queer Chinese American woman and her long-widowed mother.

Nov 12, 2021 — First Person At the end of February of 2020, I watched The Gleaners and I with my boyfriend at BAM. It was, I thought, an ordinary day. We bought tickets in advance because we knew the small theater’s screenings always...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Nov 26, 2019 — In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte...