The Friend of the Family

Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.

May 30, 2025 — The director discusses her path from neuroscience to cinema and the childhood memory that inspired her short August Visitor, a film about culture and intergenerational understanding.

Dec 4, 2024 — Before she won acclaim as a pioneering director, the Hollywood icon made her name as a powerfully vivid actor who brought grit and toughness to films by such masters as Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Michael Curtiz.

Apr 3, 2024 — This year’s edition is bookended by two very New York movies.

Nov 25, 2014 — More than just observational, Les Blank’s sensual documentaries are personal and participatory celebrations of American culture.

May 19, 2014 — As in his other films, the world of Abbas Kiarostami’s latest is one of simulation, not-quite-realness, and unexpected tenderness.

Jan 11, 1989 — Thursday, March 2, 1944—the United States is in its third year of war with the Axis powers. More than 12 million Americans are fighting on various fronts; the German armies are being repulsed at Anzio and the newspapers have large...

Oct 21, 2019 — Songbook If you weren’t a devotee of the Cantopop world in the early 1990s, the casting of Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) may not have caught your attention. Starring in her first major role, the singer looked...

Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....

Apr 13, 2010 — Indefatigably political Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, best known for 1966’s truly revolutionary The Battle of Algiers, once stated that “the ideal director should be three-quarters Rossellini and one-quarter Eisenstein.” Certainly, one can see traces of the work of both of...