Act of God

Jul 25, 2017 — Albert Brooks brings the gift for comic deconstruction he honed in his stand-up career to this uproarious satire of baby boomer values.

Mar 14, 2017 — Religious fanaticism and anti-Communist hysteria give way to mass violence in this groundbreaking work of Mexican political cinema.

Mar 1, 2017 — In his most seductive experiment with cinematic time, Richard Linklater wrestles with the joys and challenges of long-term intimacy.

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

Oct 15, 2013 — Georges Franju’s masterpiece is the most chilling expression in cinema of our ancient preoccupation with the nature of identity.

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.

Jun 3, 2001 — Jacques Tati’s singular satire is a series of giddy encounters between people and things in which the wonders of “modern life” relinquish their functionality in favor of an unaccountably rapturous beauty.

Jul 14, 2026 — On October 30, 1992, the Provisional Irish Republican Army set off two bombs as part of an ongoing campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland. One, a small explosive planted alarmingly close to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing...