Behind the Sun

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.

May 1, 2026 — A new month begins with a Visconti restoration, a new issue of Senses of Cinema, and a deep backgrounder on Backrooms.

Oct 6, 2017 — Back when Projections was still called “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival described its program as a “yearly touchstone for experimental film.” Now neither of those terms—“avant-garde” and “experimental”—are quite broad enough to encompass all that goes...

Nov 29, 2011 — Elephant Boy: Child’s Play It’s hard to imagine a movie role more perfectly suited to the actor playing it than Toomai in Elephant Boy (1937), the part that made Selar Shaik—known as Sabu—one of the least likely superstars in Western...

Feb 2, 2022 — Released in 1972, Perry Henzell’s thrilling drama The Harder They Come, starring real-life reggae icon Jimmy Cliff as singer-turned-outlaw Ivanhoe Martin, was among the first films to prominently feature reggae music both as subject matter and on its soundtrack. The...

Dec 5, 2013 — Repertory PicksThe series Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte, currently running at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, is a wide-ranging survey of the career of the brilliant cine-essayist and multimedia artist, who died last year at age ninety-one. Among the most politically...

Mar 31, 2026 — A seven-film series in London takes measure of nuclear anxiety behind the Iron Curtain.

Jan 16, 2021 — Pedro Reyes is a Mexican artist of international renown whose conceptual, often sculptural works make use of unusual materials to imagine a better, more playful world. Over the course of his two-decade-plus career, he has married a keen social conscience with an innovative approach to solving social problems: his hands...