Saw

Jun 22, 2021 — This month’s roundup of new and noteworthy titles opens with “a counterfactual history of the movies.”

Jun 22, 2021 — The multi-hyphenate artist’s staggering and frequently autobiographical body of work reimagines the depiction of Black people in American culture, encouraging us to question everything we see.

Jun 17, 2021 — The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience...

Jun 15, 2021 — These landmark documentary portraits of intergenerational struggle in Seattle expose social horrors while also revealing the humanity of their subjects.

Jun 14, 2021 — Postwar Hollywood’s quintessential heavy wields his signature mix of brutality and neurosis to embody an abusive husband in Max Ophuls’s psychological drama.

Jun 11, 2021 — We’re watching new restorations and assessing the states of Bollywood and the modern musical.

May 27, 2021 — First Person I first watched Yi Yi on a busted cassette tape, in my small Texas town, rented from a Blockbuster behind a rice field and a pharmacy. If you were a high schooler growing up just outside of Houston...

May 25, 2021 — 1. William Lindsay Gresham’s first book—the sordid carnival-sideshow noir Nightmare Alley—was the author’s only considerable literary success. A controversial best seller upon its publication in 1946, the novel was quickly followed by a film adaptation the next year. Gresham would...

May 19, 2021 — A confession: before I made my first trip, a few years ago, to the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, I had seen precious little Indigenous cinema. The average cinephile in the West watches predominantly films made by...

May 19, 2021 — The actor, writer, and talk show regular will be remembered as an “uncommonly intense and all-around uncommon performer.”