The Ride

Sep 25, 2023 — There was a period under the Nixon administration when the collective American psyche, as seen on film, seemed almost convulsed by its fixation on the motor vehicle. Every other week a moviegoer might see a film that could broadly be...

Nov 22, 2022 — Spike Lee’s transcendent portrait of an American hero is an urgent call for the nation to live up to everything it claims to be.

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...

Aug 17, 2017 — Repertory Picks This weekend, the Gateway Film Center in Columbus, Ohio, will screen a 35 mm print of Dennis Hopper’s era-defining 1969 directorial debut, Easy Rider. Billed as the tale of a man who “went looking for America and couldn’t...

Sep 19, 2016 — If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop.

Jun 17, 2015 — Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.

Sep 4, 2013 — Only Ernst Lubitsch got the great comedian to be as funny on the big screen as he was on the radio.

Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.

Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...