Face the Music

Sep 18, 2019 — One Scene The way some rock fans talk about the sanctity of live music, you’d think it was a guaranteed path to transcendence. But of course most concerts fall far short of the sublime, and the thrill of breathing in...

Oct 9, 2018 — In a world vulnerable to authoritarianism, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television epic stands as an example of how an artist can speak to a broad audience about revolutionary politics.

Jan 30, 2018 — In his first sound film, silent-era master G. W. Pabst captures both the familial camaraderie and everyday brutality of life in the trenches.

Jan 20, 2018 — We begin with April Wolfe, writing for Film Comment and introducing us to Maxim Pozdorovkin and Our New President, which “tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, constructed almost...

Dec 21, 2017 — No one has captured the complexities of forbidden love with more intimacy than Celia Johnson in David Lean’s classic romance.

Dec 12, 2017 — Alexander Payne skewers the absurdities of American politics in this tale of a high-school presidential campaign gone ugly.

Jun 20, 2014 — Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.

Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...