The Lesson

Apr 16, 2018 — Following lineup announcements from the Cannes Film Festival and Critics’ Week, the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, or Directors’s Fortnight has presented the slate for its fiftieth edition, running from May 9 through 19. “As per the tradition of the parallel section,”...

Sep 1, 2017 — “British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) hits the American highway for this touching, if slightly underwhelming, tale of a troubled boy who strikes up a rapport with an ailing racehorse called Lean on Pete,” begins Time Out’s Dave Calhoun....

Jul 17, 2017 — We begin this round in the UK because, starting Friday, Park Circus is putting Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) back in theaters, “marking 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 initiated a major development of the country's human rights legislation...

May 23, 2017 — “For ardent Hong Sangsoo fans, 2017 couldn’t be a more rewarding year,” writes Bradley Warren at the Playlist. “Not just because the South Korean filmmaker has three new films ready—the first, On the Beach at Night Alone, launched in Berlin—or...

Feb 20, 2017 — Joan Crawford delivers one of her greatest performances in Michael Curtiz’s unsparing look at class, ambition, and the all-consuming intensity of maternal love.

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

Mar 22, 2011 — In 1985, deep into the twelve-year reign of the Reagan-Bush administration, Rob Epstein mounted a Hollywood stage with Richard Schmiechen, both men resplendent in tuxedos. Epstein was only twenty-nine years old. The director had just made history, with producer Schmiechen,...

Feb 7, 2011 — Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable...

Mar 18, 2020 — People talk a lot about the way that Rita Hayworth looked. She was the Hollywood “love goddess,” with a sensational figure, a dazzling smile, and hair that fell in long, auburn waves. The pinup so iconic that her posters were...