The Son

May 27, 2025 — A landmark of independent cinema, Charles Burnett’s debut feature captures daily life in Watts, Los Angeles, with a depth and precision that evokes the history of Black American music.

May 14, 2024 — Despite the harsh critical drubbing it received upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s lurid tale of obsession and violence is now widely regarded as a masterpiece—and as a key inspiration for an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies.

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

May 21, 2021 — On our minds this week: John Schlesinger, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, and David Cronenberg.

Apr 16, 2021 — Few motifs in Indian cinema are as potent, as laden with history and meaning, as the train. In 1955’s Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray immortalized the railways as the symbol of an alienating modernity in a newly independent India; in a...

Mar 18, 2019 — One Scene When Jia Zhangke made his 1997 feature debut, Xiao Wu, he was rebelling against decades of tradition that had drawn a hard line between cinema and reality. Chinese film history is rooted in genres found in classical theater...

Feb 6, 2019 — Ten forward-looking features and a few intriguing revivals will screen from today through Sunday in New York.

Apr 17, 2018 — Up at the top, that’s Behnaz Jafari and Jafar Panahi in Panahi’s 3 Faces, which is slated to premiere in Competition in Cannes next month. Film Comment points us to an interview with Panahi in the latest issue of World...

Apr 14, 2018 — La Repubblica’s Alessandra Vitali is among the many Italian journalists reporting on today’s passing of Vittorio Taviani at the age of eighty-eight. In 2013, Ryan Gilbey, writing for the Guardian, declared that Taviani and his brother, Paolo, eighty-six, “are among...

Jan 31, 2018 — The SXSW Film Festival, whose 2018 edition runs from March 9 through 18, has announced a lineup of 132 features—with more on the way. With descriptions from the festival . . . Narrative Feature CompetitionFamily. Director/Screenwriter: Laura Steinel. When an...