Bits of Life

Aug 26, 2021 — Steven Soderbergh lines up another series and adaptations of novels by Colson Whitehead and Taffy Brodesser-Akner are in the works.

Mar 31, 2021 — It has seemed to me for a long time that there is far too little screaming about Albert Brooks. It has seemed that way to all of his staunchest fans, who secretly relish being among the evolved few who know...

Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...

Jan 29, 2020 — It is almost impossible to discuss Sidney Lumet’s Cold War thriller Fail Safe without also considering its more financially successful cinematic foil and fellow 1964 Columbia Pictures release, Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to...

Aug 26, 2019 — In the first twenty-four features he directed, between 1925 and 1939, Alfred Hitchcock —always working closely with his wife Alma Reville (variously credited for assistant direction, screenplay, and continuity)—evolved from apprenticeship to technical mastery to an exuberant flowering that made...

Apr 2, 2019 — Mike Leigh’s endless fascination with human behavior is palpable in every one of the films he’s made over the course of his nearly fifty-year career. With an acute sensitivity to rhythm, character, and setting, he extracts extraordinary moments from the...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Jun 6, 2017 — Combining sardonic humor with poignant characterizations, this cult comedy explores the discontents of two high-school graduates adrift in strip-mall America.

Jan 23, 2017 — In his radical debut feature, Ousmane Sembène reveals the agony of the postcolonial experience through the story of a Senegalese migrant abused by her French employers.