A Most Violent Year

Nov 23, 2022 — In Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens, the odyssey of a New Jersey transplant trying to survive in Manhattan is accompanied by the music of one of the Garden State’s most iconic punk bands.

Jan 25, 2022 — A Victorian-era tale of self-discovery, Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or winner exults in the thrill of female rebellion.

Jun 17, 2020 — At a 2012 screening of work by the late artist and filmmaker, programmer Ed Halter declared: “Luther Price is Brakhage after Punk.”

Sep 30, 2019 — Critics are enthralled by a mobster’s three-and-a-half-hour alternative history of the mid-twentieth century.

Jul 7, 2015 — Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that late-forties...

Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...

Apr 27, 2009 — The idea of making a film about Japan’s most famous sex crime, with a decent budget and in conditions of complete freedom, reawakened Nagisa Oshima’s desire to direct—and the prospect of circumventing Japanese censorship must have made the decision even...

Jan 11, 1999 — This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

May 5, 1998 — Borrowing inspiration from doom-laden French crime movies like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï and ancient Chinese chronicles of patriotic assassins, John Woo’s film is a passionate cinematic upheaval.

Jan 28, 1991 — The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in...