The Way of the Househusband: The Cinema

Dec 3, 2019 — Performances If there was one mother-daughter television date my busy mum was always willing to down tools for, it was a Bette Davis movie. Her favorite—and mine, for the preteen period when I gave the thumbs-up to anything my mother...

Nov 22, 2019 — Jean-Jacques Beineix’s vibrant art-house sensation Betty Blue (1986) introduced to the world, in twenty-one-year-old Béatrice Dalle, an extraordinary new acting talent. Fully inhabiting the warmth, sexiness, and increasingly violent self-destructiveness of the title character, whose stormy love affair with an...

Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...

Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...

Sep 23, 2019 — By the dawn of the eighties, Divine had already made an outsize impression in a handful of John Waters features, playing insolent women on the wrong side of the law in cult films such as Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble,...

Mar 27, 2019 — Certain films find a way of creeping into your brain because they invite you to explore whole new worlds that continue well beyond their final frames. These movies force you to keep looking for answers to questions posed not just...

Mar 26, 2019 — Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer may not have become a widely celebrated figure during his lifetime the way his compatriot Billy Wilder did, but his career was nonetheless a marvel of persistence and resourcefulness. By the late 1930s, the director,...

Mar 4, 2019 — Thanks to Charly Palmer, our edition of To Sleep with Anger certainly catches the eye. The Atlanta-based artist, who illustrated our cover for Charles Burnett’s long-underseen 1990 film, has for years been renowned for his vibrant, densely layered depictions of...

Feb 21, 2018 — This month, two cult favorites make their way to the United Kingdom in their Criterion editions: Jonathan Demme’s 1986 kinky romantic thriller Something Wild and George A. Romero’s groundbreaking 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead. Head over to...

Apr 6, 2017 — Repertory PicksOn Sunday evening, Alfonso Cuarón’s sultry road movie Y tu mamá también (2001) will roll into the Wilmette Theatre in Wilmette, Illinois. After helming two Hollywood productions that focused on the process of growing up—an imaginative adaptation of the...