The Last Laugh

Mar 9, 2012 — The cinematographer tells us how he and Louis Malle went about shooting Vanya on 42nd Street in a decrepit Manhattan theater.

Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....

Feb 29, 1988 — Marx Brothers aficionados have argued for years over the relative merits of A Night at the Opera and the “purer” Marx movies such as Duck Soup. Certainly there’s no comparison on a point-by-point basis: Duck Soup is a classic of...

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles takes aim at Hollywood’s way of representing race in this blistering satire about a white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned Black overnight.

Aug 14, 2025 — MoMI presents a series of films that might be found in the neighborhood of Ari Aster’s fourth feature.

Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.

Jul 21, 2025 — Summer offers new biographies and memoirs, expansively big ideas, and more than a few curious fictions.

Sep 19, 2023 — Warmly received in Venice, Cooper’s portrait of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre now heads to festivals in New York, Zurich, London, Mill Valley, and Los Angeles.

Feb 11, 2020 — How might four history-making Oscars impact movies from here on out?

Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...