The Beginning and the End

May 22, 2017 — “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) isn’t the wittiest or most exciting movie that Noah Baumbach has ever made, but it might just be the most humane,” writes David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “While all of his films have a cutting...

Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.

Jan 26, 2015 — Scenes without endings, sounds without corresponding images, actions without seeming motivation—Lucrecia Martel’s sense-heightening debut offers a cinema of subtraction.

Mar 12, 2013 — Working in America, German master Fritz Lang contributed to the anti-Nazi effort with this nightmarish, surreal tale of espionage.

Oct 26, 2010 — A coming-of-age story about a clique of teenage schoolgirls who will never grow old and a demon spirit in the guise of a spinster who was never young, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s eye-poppingly demented, jaw-droppingly inventive House is 1970s Japanese pop culture...

Dec 2, 1990 — In Martin Scorsese’s hands, the camera is not simply a recording device, but an x-ray machine—and it shows us close-ups of the human soul.

Nov 21, 2023 — What stuck with me most after watching La cérémonie (1995) for the first time was the chewing gum.It’s not the scene most often cited in discussions of this late-career classic from French thriller master Claude Chabrol. Don’t get me wrong:...

Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 The film world and ordinary people(s) in the four corners of the globe have long awaited the home-video release of Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun, 1970), the groundbreaking feature debut of one of Africa’s...

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

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...