The Brazilwood Man

Oct 25, 2019 — It was a very long road to theaters for the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings, a rousing record of a legendary boxing match, and a testament to the infectious energy, sly humor, and strong social conscience of Muhammad Ali....

Sep 25, 2019 — With Polyester, his first movie to flirt with the mainstream, maverick filmmaker John Waters set out to send up the overripe Hollywood melodramas of yesteryear—but also “to make a movie that really stunk,” as he has put it. Inspired by...

Sep 18, 2019 — One Scene The way some rock fans talk about the sanctity of live music, you’d think it was a guaranteed path to transcendence. But of course most concerts fall far short of the sublime, and the thrill of breathing in...

Sep 17, 2019 — With his last completed film, the sly, suggestive comedy of manners Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch brought to the screen one of the most irrepressible, irresistible Hollywood heroines of the forties. The niece of a plumber in a Britain on the...

Sep 13, 2019 — Nicholas Britell’s scores are so finely calibrated to the movies they inhabit that they become inextricable from the images on-screen. Whether it’s the staccato heartbeat of orchestral strings in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight or the mix of piano motifs and hip-hop...

Jul 30, 2019 — One Scene Though he works in the highly stylized realm of the horror genre, Ari Aster’s acute attention to the fraught dynamics of intimate relationships—evident in his psychologically penetrating new film Midsommar—makes it easy to see how he draws inspiration...

Jul 23, 2019 — The near-future totalitarian England of Michael Radford’s 1984, a powerful adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel, is a very dark place indeed. The film’s brilliant production design and color-drained photography emphasize the grubby squalor and soul-crushing uniformity of the surveillance...

Jul 19, 2019 — In 1983, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall undertook to make a documentary about the lives of homeless and runaway teenagers in Seattle, expanding on the work that Mark and McCall had done for a...

Jul 12, 2019 — It was four decades after the end of World War II that Salomon Perel, who had been born in Germany in 1925 to a Polish Jewish family, sat down to write the remarkable story of how he survived the war...

Jun 13, 2019 — Over the course of their ten films together, the fleet-footed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers took many memorable spins. But their dancing in Swing Time, the sublime 1936 musical that marked their sixth pairing, is a cut above. “I think...