The Edge

May 3, 2011 — French auteur cinema has increasingly been exploring themes of sex through scenarios whose explicitness verges on the pornographic. Along with Patrice Chéreau (Intimacy, 2001), Léos Carax (Pola X, 1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi (Baise-moi, 2000), and Gaspar Noé...

Jun 22, 2009 — So much critical ink has been shed over Last Year at Marienbad that one might wonder if the flood of commentary, once receded, would take the film along with it. Alain Resnais’ second feature has been lavishly praised and royally...

Sep 8, 1998 — In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...

Erika Balsom is a reader in film studies at King’s College London. Her criticism collection The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture is forthcoming from Columbia University Press later this year.

Jean Ma is the author of Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (2010), Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema (2015), and At the Edges of Sleep (forthcoming). She teaches film and media studies at Stanford University.

Jun 25, 2024 — Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

Mar 12, 2024 — In this profoundly emotional portrait of artist Nan Goldin, director Laura Poitras explores how her subject’s creative sensibility and commitment to activism spring from the same source.

Jun 3, 2016 — During the second incarnation of this festival dedicated to movies preserved on nitrate film, Jared Case, the festival’s executive director, talks about his work bringing the Nitrate Picture Show to life, selecting this year’s films, and why nitrate remains a...

Aug 25, 2026 — The pioneering husband-and-wife duo transformed the field of Japanese nonfiction cinema with their portraits of spectacular, edgy personalities and collectives under duress.

Jun 5, 2026 — We’re wrapping the week with conversations with Lilly Wachowski, Shunji Iwai, and Tsui Hark as well as essays on Ozu and Ghatak.