The First Year

Oct 24, 2025 — It is hard to conceive of a film more dazzlingly, dizzyingly divided against itself—or one more appropriately so—than this delirious creation of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and director Ken Russell.

Sep 23, 2025 — A tale of animal survival in a world deserted by humanity, Gints Zilbalodis’s Oscar-winning triumph casts a hushed spell with its elemental storytelling, immersive visual style, and creaturely subjectivity.

Dec 13, 2023 — Through the ages, some tales have spread their seeds like trees, creating forests of imagination. Fairy tales often have that quality. But I doubt that Carlo Collodi, the author of the 1883 novel Pinocchio, would like his story to be...

Nov 29, 2023 — To watch Matt Wolf’s revelatory documentaries is to see life as a moving collage in which the past and present are woven together. Over the course of nine intensely researched and intricately crafted features and shorts, Wolf has combined his passion for...

Nov 21, 2023 — What stuck with me most after watching La cérémonie (1995) for the first time was the chewing gum.It’s not the scene most often cited in discussions of this late-career classic from French thriller master Claude Chabrol. Don’t get me wrong:...

Sep 26, 2023 — Brett Morgen’s portrait of David Bowie is a free-associative hybrid of pop history and imaginative extravaganza—impressionistic, eclectically allusive, and, above all, immersive.

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.

Mar 28, 2023 — Described by director Joan Micklin Silver as “a kind of weird romantic comedy,” this defiantly ambiguous exploration of amour fou presents its obsessive antihero in all his contradictions.

Dec 1, 2022 — During the production of our release of Amores perros in 2020, the film’s writer-director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, gave us a remarkable window into his creative process, showing us some of the dozens of note cards he’d used in planning scenes...

May 5, 2022 — Has Asian American cinematic representation really reached unprecedented heights, as almost all recent film coverage on the subject claims? In the past two years, critics’ polls, New York Times features, and Golden Globes scandals have marked the newfound success of...