The Presence

Aug 29, 2023 — Exalting Black women’s self-invention with DIY effervescence, Drylongso (1998) is a gorgeously generous study of friendship, creativity, violence, and survival. The multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith developed the idea for the project from her habit of taking Polaroid photographs. Shot on...

Apr 25, 2023 — In his second Palme d’Or–winning film, Ruben Östlund uses familiar reality-television tropes to stage a deeply unnerving spectacle of obscene wealth and class outrage.

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films Come on now, honey sugarYou know your baby loveYou know just the other dayI was gonna take you to go see a movieSweet Sweetback . . . Stevie Wonder, “Sweet Little Girl,” 1972 We went...

Oct 28, 2020 — More than anything, Claudine felt like a reprieve; the film, directed by John Berry and released in 1974, gave audiences a compelling alternative depiction of Black life from those about Black drug lords and mafia dons fighting over real estate...

Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 The film world and ordinary people(s) in the four corners of the globe have long awaited the home-video release of Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun, 1970), the groundbreaking feature debut of one of Africa’s...

Aug 13, 2020 — First Person In 1960 The Apartment was playing at Cinema Rialto and was advertised with a loud red poster. I was too young to see it at the time, but I do recall overhearing my parents describing it to their...

Feb 25, 2020 — In these times of Trumpidation, thirty years after its auspicious release, Paris Is Burning seems even more relevant than it did in early 1991, when I wrote the following for Black Film Review about Jennie Livingston’s phenomenal documentary on New...

Dec 12, 2018 — As the commanding presence at the center of Samuel Fuller’s wild feminist western Forty Guns, the great Barbara Stanwyck taps into the tough, no-nonsense bearing she’d honed on-screen since the late twenties, playing the part of a corrupt rancher who...

Feb 5, 2014 — Performances We don’t often talk about documentaries as featuring performances. But consider the highly performative people at the centers of Grey Gardens, General Idi Amin Dada, and last year’s The Act of Killing, or even the seemingly more modest souls...