The Carnal Sutra Mat

Jun 22, 2011 — Theresa Russell is attracted to the very things that repel most actors. In 1976’s The Last Tycoon, her first movie (and Elia Kazan’s last), she is unafraid of seeming to do very little. Young actresses like to show you they...

Mar 20, 2023 — Among the highlights are a collection of erotic thrillers, a David Lynch retrospective, and a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of one of the most iconic moments in silent cinema.

Jul 3, 2025 — The week wraps with Peter Wollen on Performance, a top ten from Radu Jude, and a conversation with Dag Johan Haugerud.

Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...

Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

Jan 31, 2024 — MoMA presents a series of musicals, comedies, and melodramas injected with Buñuel’s singular surrealist vision.

Jun 11, 2021 — “The whole world is dying of panicky fright.” The opening on-screen text of Todd Haynes’s Poison promises an unsettled experience. Yet these words also might as well be predicting the puritanical response to the film that erupted from conservative quarters. After winning...

Jan 17, 2012 — “I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to,” Catherine Deneuve remarked to Pascal Bonitzer in 2004, about the making of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de jour. “There were moments when I felt totally used....

Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...

Sep 4, 2024 — The festival launched RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys and brought in a slew of critical favorites fresh from their premieres in Venice.