Very Bad Things

Sep 22, 2009 — 1967 was the year when a great divide opened between “pop” and “rock,” and when the burgeoning S.F. hippie subculture began to usurp the chirpier L.A. world of surf music and Sonny and Cher.

Mar 19, 1996 — “[He] loves to set his figures in action against greenish or purplish backgrounds, in which we can glimpse the phosphorescence of decay and sniff the coming storm.”—Charles Baudelaire, writing on Edgar Allan Poe What’s striking about Seven is that the...

May 14, 2026 — Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature is met with raves, while three other early entries are seeing mixed reviews.

Feb 25, 2025 — Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

Apr 15, 2021 — Catherine Breillat and Todd Field are getting back behind the camera, while Scorsese and Spielberg forge ahead with their latest projects.

Nov 29, 2019 — Since its debut in 2003, the online film publication Reverse Shot has found playful and provocative ways of blurring the boundaries between presumed opposites. With their tradition of symposiums—collections of newly commissioned essays on various topics and questions in film...

Sep 30, 2017 — Before We Vanish, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, screens tonight (Saturday) and tomorrow (October 1) as part of the Main Slate of this year’s New York Film Festival.“This giddily enjoyable stew of absurdist gore from...

Sep 21, 2017 — The editors of Senses of Cinema open Issue 84 with a “near exhaustive dossier” on Christian Petzold and a second entitled “Sartre at the Movies.” Here, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of French cinema, Dudley Andrew, explores the ideas...

Apr 14, 2014 — Lars von Trier brought his brand of provocation to his widest audience yet with this inquiry into faith and human goodness.

Oct 28, 2011 — The following is excerpted from a 1972 interview that film scholar Joan Mellen conducted with director Kaneto Shindo. The interview originally appeared in the 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema. I find the social dimension of your films very...