Light of Day

Aug 19, 2002 — René Clair’s musical comedy comprises a window on a particular lost black and white neverworld—bouncy with melody, soaked in spring light, wistful about the conflicted relationship between serendipity and love.

Aug 12, 1991 — It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock.  A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the...

Jul 2, 2026 — I first met Courtney Love in 1994. I was twelve years old, and I felt ugly and confused pretty much all the time. I was slouching through the locker bay at Calle Mayor Middle School in Torrance, California, when I...

Jan 30, 2025 — The next four days see the spotlights hit Frederick Wiseman, Jerry Schatzberg, Chantal Akerman, and more.

May 28, 2024 — With just a few exceptions, critics are generally pleased with this year’s awards.

Aug 28, 2023 — Throughout her four-decade career as a writer and director, Susan Seidelman has told complex stories about unconventional women striving to express themselves and maintain their autonomy. Her genre-melding films fuse a passion for the pleasures of Hollywood spectacle with a...

Jul 8, 2022 — This week: Juliette Binoche’s work with Krzysztof Kieślowski and Claire Denis, post-Berlin School German cinema, and Tom Cruise’s “immaculate superstardom.”

May 18, 2022 — Just slightly northwest of Death Valley, in what is now eastern California, a mountain range carves out the eastern edge of the Owens Valley. Sculpted by bedrock pushed between tectonic faults during the late Proterozoic to Cambrian periods, the Inyo...

Feb 24, 2022 — More than seventy films, including work from Sergei Parajanov, Ana Vaz, Ben Rivers, and Daïchi Saïto, are freely available worldwide.

Sep 16, 2021 — For some, it’s “a relentless, propulsive chase movie,” while others find this first part to be “a turgid preamble with little payoff.”