The Bear

Oct 2, 2014 — People struggle to escape their socially dictated roles in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s moving, Douglas Sirk–inspired melodrama.

Oct 26, 2023 — Ever since he began working with the Miami-based film festival and collective Third Horizon in 2016, Jonathan Ali has been finding ways of celebrating Caribbean cinema and how it captures the irreducible complexity of the region and its diaspora. He...

Jan 13, 2022 — Yes, he opened doors, but he also brought a singular presence to American cinema.

Apr 16, 2021 — Few motifs in Indian cinema are as potent, as laden with history and meaning, as the train. In 1955’s Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray immortalized the railways as the symbol of an alienating modernity in a newly independent India; in a...

Feb 23, 2018 — “Eighteen years young and still eagerly nudging audiences toward discovery, Film Comment Selects is a film series as pointed act of correction,” writes Ed Gonzalez at the top of his overview in the Village Voice of the series opening today...

Oct 17, 2017 — One of the very best podcasts out there, You Must Remember This, is back with a new season, “Bela and Boris.” Karina Longworth introduces the first episode, “Where the Monsters Came From” (41’40”): “Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were two...

Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...

Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s genius is to focus resolutely on what comes before or after or falls in between the decisive actions: it’s a crime film where we learn how gangsters brush their teeth.

Jan 11, 1994 — A harrowing nightmare about life in inner-city hell, this 1993 sleeper-hit is a powerhouse filmmaking debut by the Hughes brothers.

May 14, 2019 — It all comes down to that first wink. About half an hour through Michael Haneke’s 1997 cause célèbre Funny Games, Paul (Arno Frisch), one of the two politely psychotic young home invaders who’ve taken a family captive, leads one of his...