The Goumbé of the Young Revelers

Sep 5, 2019 — Critics split three ways: Joker is just plain great, or great but dangerous, or dangerous and also really quite bad.

Aug 19, 2019 — The early days of the talkie were certainly a sensational time for the movies, as Hollywood didn’t shy away from portraying all manner of debauchery on-screen. And no star better embodies this bawdy, brassy period before the enforcement of the...

Aug 2, 2019 — Extraordinarily long movies, challenging movies, and even ugly movies figure into this week’s round.

Jul 30, 2019 — One Scene Though he works in the highly stylized realm of the horror genre, Ari Aster’s acute attention to the fraught dynamics of intimate relationships—evident in his psychologically penetrating new film Midsommar—makes it easy to see how he draws inspiration...

Jul 29, 2019 — Three decades after its release, Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do the Right Thing stands as one of the most politically audacious, and visually captivating, films of his career. With the help of cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, Lee vividly captured a sweltering summer...

Jul 26, 2019 — This week’s round features conversations with Abbas Kiarostami, Christopher Doyle, Julia Loktev, and Barry Jenkins.

Jul 23, 2019 — The near-future totalitarian England of Michael Radford’s 1984, a powerful adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel, is a very dark place indeed. The film’s brilliant production design and color-drained photography emphasize the grubby squalor and soul-crushing uniformity of the surveillance...

Jul 15, 2019 — After premiering at Cannes in 1980, Franco Rosso’s Babylon was suppressed both in its native England and abroad for fear that it would inflame racial tensions, a fate that resulted in decades of obscurity. But over the years this reggae-fueled drama has...

Jun 24, 2019 — Jacques Tati’s cinematic legacy rests on his four sublime comedies featuring Monsieur Hulot, his on-screen alter ego, a gawky, good-hearted Frenchman hopelessly befuddled by the modern world that’s sprung up around him. But no less than such masterpieces as Monsieur...

Jun 13, 2019 — Photo by Sara Driver Half a century ago, George A. Romero’s midnight-movie hit Night of the Living Dead invented the zombie genre as we know it and turned American independent filmmaking on its head. Made on an ultralow budget with...