The Road Back

Apr 24, 2024 — In this early-career gem from one of the most beloved Japanese animation directors of all time, an extravagant sci-fi narrative is anchored by the transcendent power of young love and poignant observations of modern life.

Oct 1, 2017 — “Since I saw Faces Places at its premiere at Cannes in May, [Agnès] Varda’s latest documentary has cemented itself on my running list of the year’s best titles,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Made with the French...

Jul 17, 2017 — We begin this round in the UK because, starting Friday, Park Circus is putting Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) back in theaters, “marking 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 initiated a major development of the country's human rights legislation...

Jan 27, 2010 — This piece first appeared in the 1991 Wim Wenders collection The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversation (Faber and Faber), translated by Michael Hofmann. The story’s about a man who turns up somewhere in the desert out of nowhere and returns...

Mar 19, 2019 — A few weeks after Barbara Loden, the writer, director, and star of Wanda, died at age forty-eight after a long battle with cancer, Elia Kazan, her widower, was interviewed by Marguerite Duras for Cahiers du cinéma. It was 1980, and...

Feb 1, 2022 — Douglas Sirk’s 1956 masterpiece is a visceral tragedy that lays bare the spiritual malaise of the ruling class.

Jun 30, 2021 — First Person The first thing I’d like to note is that long before I was briefly an usher in a movie theater, my father was briefly an usher in a movie theater. That might not be so much in my...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

May 22, 2023 — Get in character for a journey through the history of Method acting, a movement that transformed the art of screen performance forever.

May 3, 2019 — BAM’s Black 90s series, Nina Menkes, a poet, Avengers, and a list of the top films of the 2010s are among this week’s highlights.