The After

Jul 31, 2013 — The story of the author’s long correspondence with the silent film icon.

Jul 12, 2011 — Heeeere’s Johnny, the desperate, destructive prophet-of-the-apocalypse protagonist of Mike Leigh’s brilliantly corrosive Naked (1993), a sexually explicit update to a long line of British films, plays, and novels about angry young men. Johnny might be mistaken for a mere misanthrope,...

The creator of perhaps cinema’s most purely spiritual works, this Danish master made films that explored the eternal battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Dec 7, 2010 — “Eroticism,” Luis Buñuel told an interviewer, “is a diabolic pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.” No filmmaker conveys this idea with more ingenuity and macabre gusto than David Cronenberg, whose movies (hilariously, terrifyingly) illustrate the equation of...

One of cinema’s great subversives and mischief makers, this Spanish master combined surrealist non sequiturs with attacks on the bourgeoisie and the church.

Jan 22, 2007 — A delightfully old-fashioned morality tale, Robert Day’s low-budget space flick is far more than the standard monster fare it was initially sold as.

Jul 17, 2000 — Designed to steam viewers’ glasses, Roger Vadim’s directorial debut boldly announced the arrival of Brigitte Bardot.

Jun 16, 1992 — Of the 18 movies made by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, none was as personally and artistically fulfilling as The Tales of Hoffmann. This dazzling screen adaptation of the Offenbach opera—a visual, sonic, and sensual delight—marked...

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, 2022 — During a precarious time for film exhibition, Inney Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, had an idea to rethink the bounds of nonfiction cinema. He ended up conceiving Prismatic Ground, a festival that launched...