A Hard Day

May 28, 2013 — Mike Leigh’s breakthrough is a funny film about serious things, and an emotional and slyly political take on consumer culture.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...

Feb 2, 2011 — This essay first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the author. Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was...

Feb 2, 2011 — This interview was published in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the Toronto International Film Festival. The photograph appears courtesy of Colleen Murphy. We met on March...

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...

Jan 22, 2026 — This visually stunning masterpiece from Kazakh New Wave iconoclast Ardak Amirkulov is one of the few films that looks evil in the eye without flinching.

Jan 12, 2026 — Let’s catch up with some of the most notable best-of-2025 listing and polling.

Dec 18, 2025 — At year’s end, we’re reading about the partnership and breakup of Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann—and much more.

Aug 12, 2025 — This remarkably sensitive yet jarringly violent romance epitomizes director Youssef Chahine’s late-fifties hybrid style, which combined elements of Hollywood entertainment with an unmistakably Egyptian spirit.