Alien from L.A.

Oct 24, 2019 — D irector Ishiro Honda gathered his crew and gave them an ultimatum. He was about to put his career at risk, and he would only work with those who approached his current project—a movie about a radiation-spewing prehistoric reptile that...

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

Feb 19, 2018 — Jonathan Demme put an uncompromisingly feminist spin on the law-enforcement procedural with this wildly successful, Oscar-winning drama.

Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...

Dec 29, 2022 — Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Catherine Breillat, Michael Mann, Christian Petzold, David Fincher . . .

Mar 25, 2019 — The writer, producer, and director packed trenchant satire into his genre-hopping B-movies.

May 20, 2018 — A lifelong movie collector remembers the thrill of discovering the granddaddy of all monsters on Super 8.

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Jan 2, 2020 — Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Chloé Zhao, and Joanna Hogg are among the many directors ready to roll out their latest features.

Jul 30, 2026 — Gene Tierney, Robert Kramer, Chantal Akerman, and Alfred Hitchcock are among the many personalities featured this month.