Under the Skin

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

Jul 20, 2018 — American audiences weren’t ready for Barbara Loden’s Wanda when it premiered in 1970. A stark portrait of a working-class woman (played with raw conviction by Loden herself) who breaks free of a miserable marriage, only to find herself on the...

Oct 30, 2017 — Just in time for Halloween, we’re musing on what it is that makes a movie frightening with the help of filmmaking duo Josh and Benny Safdie.

Dec 19, 2017 — Reese Witherspoon looks back on how she perfected the details of her performance as a high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne’s Election.

Apr 30, 2025 — Elena Gorfinkel has written a new study of Loden’s groundbreaking feature and curated a season for the BFI.

Sep 4, 2019 — The late actor became an icon of his generation with this moody, brilliant non-performance, informed by his intimate knowledge of chaos and death.

Oct 26, 2017 — Senses of Cinema has launched a podcast and topics discussed in the first episode (62’45”) include Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Jacques Tourneur, and the Mexican narco wars onscreen. And speaking of Blade Runner, Cinematologists Dario Llinares and Neil Fox...

Mar 3, 2026 — The BAMPFA series presents newly restored classics and four films by Rakhshan Banietemad.

Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...

Jun 18, 2019 — In his idiosyncratic, award-winning second film, Bruno Dumont uses the story of an alienated police detective to investigate the most elemental aspects of human experience.