Life Dances On

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Jan 28, 2014 — Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Nov 12, 2021 — First Person At the end of February of 2020, I watched The Gleaners and I with my boyfriend at BAM. It was, I thought, an ordinary day. We bought tickets in advance because we knew the small theater’s screenings always...

Jan 22, 2013 — With his unique use of new 3D technology, Wim Wenders found an unprecedented way for the movie camera to capture bodies in space.

Oct 12, 2018 — Two early works by Ingmar Bergman show the Swedish master grappling with the conventions of melodrama, which would go on to influence his later explorations of spiritual torment.

Jan 24, 2023 — Filled with evocative images and guided by the unique aesthetic sensibility of the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s film is an exploration of the power of grief that is paradoxically uplifting.

Sep 28, 2022 — Sarah Maldoror’s only completed narrative feature tracks the Angolan struggle for independence from Portugal and reckons with the interlocking systems of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Dec 4, 2020 — Forty years after her death, people still imitate Mae West’s voice: that slinky contralto drawl that hit each Brooklyn-inflected vowel like a cab driver leaning on his horn. The voice would be memorable even if she had by some wild...

Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.