The System

Oct 19, 2015 — Take a look back at critics’ initial reactions to David Lynch’s haunting masterpiece Mulholland Dr.

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Jun 10, 2014 — Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was...

Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...

Apr 6, 2010 — Many things set Red Desert apart from Michelangelo Antonioni’s other early sixties portraits of spiritual and social alienation (its focus on industry and environmental toxicity, for one), but none do so more strikingly than its color cinematography. It was the...

A delicate hand, effervescent humor, and an economy with words and images define this German director, who became a legendary figure in Hollywood comedy.

Jul 7, 2008 — Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years,...

Aug 28, 2006 — Pietro Germi’s brilliant satire skewers Italian society’s devotion to appearances and its cultlike obsession with gossip and honor.

Jan 30, 2023 — Celebrate Black History Month with a collection of films that survey African American history on-screen, a look at literary legend James Baldwin’s cinematic legacy, and a retrospective devoted to the independent trailblazer Oscar Micheaux.

Aug 23, 2022 — Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut, a western depicting Black cowboy heroes, allowed two of the industry’s most significant Black stars to reorient themselves as artists.