High and Low

Nov 15, 2024 — Catherine Breillat’s debut feature and series programmed by Jenni Olson and Lizzie Borden are among this week’s highlights.

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Oct 20, 2017 — New York. We opened yesterday’s entry on goings on here and there with a round on MoMA’s series Strange Illusions: Poverty Row Classics Preserved by UCLA, currently running through October 28. We need to again today, because Farran Nehme Smith...

Jun 15, 2021 — These landmark documentary portraits of intergenerational struggle in Seattle expose social horrors while also revealing the humanity of their subjects.

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Sep 29, 2018 — This “lean but evocative allegory” can be read in a surprising number of ways.

Sep 26, 2017 — This collection of excerpts from interviews with Stan Brakhage illuminates the evolution of his philosophy of film through his career.

Mar 20, 2013 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s adroit masterpiece is war film, dark comedy, historical drama, poignant romance, and a portrait of the modern woman.

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.

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.