Real Life

Jul 1, 2013 — How the original comic everyman made us laugh and fear for his life.

Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.

Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...

Mar 14, 2005 — A director is naturally a man like everyone else. Yet his life isn’t normal. For us, seeing is a necessity. For a painter, too, the problem is to see. But while the painter has to discover a static reality, or...

Oct 4, 2004 — Robert Altman’s political satire, broadcast on HBO in mostly half-hour segments during the 1988 campaign season, is a sort of trompe l’oeil video chronicle of the constantly surprising presidential fight of an obscure Michigan Democratic congressmen.

Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.

Nov 26, 2001 — Peter Weir’s first film to be released in America insists on the tangible power of spiritual life.

Jul 14, 2026 — One of the funniest and most affecting scenes in 1970s Hollywood cinema is also one of the most quietly radical—no small feat in a decade of movies marked by wiggy experimentation, explosions of brutal and cathartic violence, and shaggy new...

Jun 30, 2026 — The distinction between social and political cinema is not always clear. The former category, which focuses on realistic portrayals of the everyday lives and struggles of the working class, generally includes the films of Italian neorealism and British social realism,...

Jun 29, 2026 — In the run-up to the country’s 250th birthday, several venues are offering prompts for celebration and reflection.