A Matter of Life and Death

Oct 20, 2020 — At the start of The Gunfighter, Jimmy Ringo is a man with eleven kills to his name, soon to be twelve. But the only place he actually appears to be very violent, or even very vital, is in other people’s...

Jul 15, 2020 — When I first saw The Lady Eve (1941), in my teens, I was certain I had never seen a comedy more perfectly constructed, a judgment that the subsequent decades have not revised. I had also seen none more acutely witty,...

Jan 28, 2018 — The Sundance Film Festival has presented this year’s round of awards, and on that page you’ll find the descriptions that have tagged along with each title since the day it was announced as part of the lineup. Below, you’ll find...

Sep 4, 2013 — Only Ernst Lubitsch got the great comedian to be as funny on the big screen as he was on the radio.

Oct 12, 2010 — One Every movie is two stories: the one it tells and the one that remains to be told about it by those involved in its creation. These two narratives converge in a certain current of the cinema of the past...

Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...

Jun 27, 2024 — At their best, movies that showcase a sizable collective of virtuosic actors can give you the feeling of a rich ecosystem being brought to life.

Feb 12, 2007 — The trailblazing career of the extraordinary singer, actor, and activist was pivotal to the emergence of a black film aesthetic and, by extension, an African-American cultural identity.

Dec 18, 2000 — Elegant humor cloaks despair in Luis Buñuel’s masterwork, wherein greedy characters flee their toxic lives and find refuge in the loneliness of dreams.

Jun 25, 2024 — Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.