The Last Dance

Jun 23, 2026 — “Ozone Hole over Baltimore?” queries a panicky 1992 headline in the Baltimore Sun. Sure, as the article clarifies, the Maryland metropolis, eternal home base of trash icon John Waters, is no more vulnerable to ozone depletion than any other city...

May 26, 2026 — Of all the performing arts, stand-up comedy may be the most ephemeral, even more so if the humor is considered dangerous or taboo. Stand-up relies on the charged dynamic between a comedian and an audience, with both sides often bringing...

Nov 26, 2024 — In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.

Mar 26, 2024 — In Gus Van Sant’s wickedly funny tale of suburban depravity, Nicole Kidman plays a vacuous weather reporter whose hunger for fame anticipates our own era of digital celebrity.

Dec 14, 2021 — In 1968, soon after he graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Mani Kaul made an arresting short titled Forms and Designs. It observes artisans at work across the country, some swimming alone against the tide of mass...

Mar 9, 2021 — “Oral tradition is a tradition of images. What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in direct...

Mar 3, 2020 — American cinema is over 125 years old, and African Americans have been a part of it from the beginning. This participation has often been fraught, stymied, and curtailed, but the desire to use motion pictures to craft a self-image has...

Dec 13, 2019 — A few years ago, Juliette said in an interview that she was building her filmography in disorder. This stayed with me for several reasons, firstly because it demonstrates a deep and intimate understanding of the way in which life and...

Jul 20, 2018 — American audiences weren’t ready for Barbara Loden’s Wanda when it premiered in 1970. A stark portrait of a working-class woman (played with raw conviction by Loden herself) who breaks free of a miserable marriage, only to find herself on the...

Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...