The Box

Jun 21, 2017 — Those lists of twenty-five best films of the twenty-first century (so far) keep coming, and J. Hoberman’s now posted his, too. He’s customized the rules somewhat, and we can be glad: “My single ‘best’ film-object”—Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010)—“is followed...

May 20, 2017 — “The film industry is full of unassuming figures quietly holding everything together without ever demanding a share of the limelight,” begins Gwilym Mumford in the Guardian. Filmworker, a “tender documentary” premiering in the Cannes Classics program, “makes time to profile...

May 8, 2017 — Writer Durga Chew-Bose explores her personal connection to Uma Das Gupta’s quietly captivating performance as a carefree young girl in the masterful opening installment of The Apu Trilogy.

Jun 6, 2012 — A killer breakfast

Oct 26, 2010 — A coming-of-age story about a clique of teenage schoolgirls who will never grow old and a demon spirit in the guise of a spinster who was never young, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s eye-poppingly demented, jaw-droppingly inventive House is 1970s Japanese pop culture...

Apr 22, 2010 — It’s easy to get anxious about the place of Jean-Luc Godard in our cultural slipstream. He’s held a top-shelf slot of honor that has seemed unassailable for nearly sixty years, but sometimes I fear that his currency is becoming drastically...

Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.

Mar 17, 2020 — Released in, or rather let loose upon, the first year of the new millennium, Spike Lee’s febrile and ferocious media satire Bamboozled—the fifteenth feature-length “joint” of a prolific career—found its writer-director in an unflinching mode and an unforgiving mood. According...

Oct 2, 2019 — 1. Local Hero was the first film soundtrack that Dire Straits singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler ever composed and performed, and the album was so successful that it reportedly made more money than the film. The final song in the...

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...