Life Is Life

Sep 8, 2022 — All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is the only nonfiction film competing in Venice—and Werner Herzog and Mark Cousins remain as busy as ever.

Jun 8, 2022 — The Indian director, actor, and producer’s early death has enshrined him as a tragic icon in public memory. But there is more to his art than misery.

Apr 6, 2022 — A playfully philosophical drama, My American Uncle has been largely forgotten, yet it is the most down-to-earth of the French master’s exhilarating engagements with modernist aesthetics.

Feb 1, 2022 — Douglas Sirk’s 1956 masterpiece is a visceral tragedy that lays bare the spiritual malaise of the ruling class.

Jan 24, 2022 — Two new books on the wildly inventive comedian and filmmaker make a complementary pair.

Oct 8, 2021 — In the news this week: Isabelle Huppert, David Cronenberg, Peggy Ahwesh, Doris Wishman, Tacita Dean, and Orson Welles.

Sep 22, 2021 — No one’s claiming that Cry Macho is a great movie, but plenty are moved to reflect on what Eastwood has meant to us over all these years.

Apr 19, 2021 — What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics....

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...

Oct 30, 2018 — Ridiculous on the outside but full of truth on the inside, Rob Reiner’s fairy-tale classic is a childhood touchstone for generations of movie lovers.