Cow

Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.

Sep 10, 2013 — Martin Ritt’s 1965 movie of John le Carré’s first great novel (and first best seller), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, declares “a plague on all your houses” to capitalists, Communists, and ruthless intelligence operatives. It’s one espionage...

Apr 17, 2013 — Four of the great Japanese director’s lesser-known, early films show the coming into being of a political artist.

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Jan 30, 2013 — The improvisational arts of filmmaking, jazz, and chili.

These stories of discovery and disillusionment capture lives transformed by the open road.

Oct 23, 2012 — After winning an Oscar, John Schlesinger used his newfound artistic freedom to make a personal film in which homosexuality is treated as groundbreakingly ordinary.

Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.

Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...