The Work

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

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...

Oct 2, 2019 — 1. Local Hero was the first film soundtrack that Dire Straits singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler ever composed and performed, and the album was so successful that it reportedly made more money than the film. The final song in the...

Mar 30, 2017 — Repertory PicksNext Monday, the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor will raise the curtain on the 1969 historical fantasy Fellini Satyricon. Following the underwhelming response to his first color feature, 1965’s gaudily surreal Juliet of the Spirits, and his reluctant abandonment...

Jan 18, 2017 — Made when he was just twenty-nine, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s twenty-second feature, Fox and His Friends, showcases the New German Cinema icon in front of the camera as a working-class gay man who wins the lottery and falls prey to a...

Nov 28, 2016 — PerformancesAny paean to noir seductress nonpareil Gloria Grahame—mine included—can’t hope to surpass this encomium from Boyd McDonald, one of her most ardent and articulate devotees. Saluting Grahame’s performance in In a Lonely Place (1950) in his essential 1985 compendium, Cruising...

Jul 7, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, as part of its annual series the Auteurs, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is screening Ingmar Bergman’s 1949 film Thirst. Like many of the Swedish master’s early works, this rarely shown character...

Jan 28, 2016 — Next Friday, Film Forum begins a weeklong run of our new 4K restoration of Antonio Pietrangeli’s 1965 masterpiece I Knew Her Well, presented by filmmaker Alexander Payne. This newly rediscovered gem, one of Pietrangeli’s most complex and enchanting works, was...

Jul 18, 2014 — The annual Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, has become the hottest showcase for the latest restorations of classic and overlooked films from around the world. So we were thrilled that they decided to show our restoration of Richard Lester’s...

Mar 30, 2014 — 1. In 1964, Ingmar Bergman wrote a script for a film titled The Cannibals. It was to star Bibi Andersson, and included a small part for the up-and-coming Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, but it was ultimately tabled when Bergman became very ill...