Triumph Over Violence

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Feb 25, 2020 — In these times of Trumpidation, thirty years after its auspicious release, Paris Is Burning seems even more relevant than it did in early 1991, when I wrote the following for Black Film Review about Jennie Livingston’s phenomenal documentary on New...

Dec 30, 2019 — We asked some of our friends if they had underappreciated films from the past decade that they wanted to champion. Here’s what they chose.

Nov 29, 2019 — The BBC polls 368 critics and programmers to come up with a list of the greatest films directed by women—plus more of the best of the 2010s and 2019.

Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...

Jan 22, 2019 — Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside...

Dec 11, 2018 — Note: The terms black and white were part of the way racial categories were referred to in South Africa under apartheid. Other terms, like nonwhite and non-European, were also used to mark racial segregation. In the following essay, the term...

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Nov 21, 2017 — Terry Gilliam plunges into the filth and absurdity of medieval England with this grim fairy-tale comedy.