Ball of Fire

Jul 21, 2026 — Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed. Unlike Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, Stanton’s character hasn’t been discussed, chewed over, anticipated, and foreshadowed for...

Jul 22, 2025 — An era-defining reckoning with the sexual revolution, Mike Nichols’s controversial drama develops a rigorous form for analyzing what we have recently come to call “toxic masculinity.”

Jul 6, 2021 — Howard Hawks’s madcap battle of the sexes is a reminder of how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be.

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...

Feb 20, 2017 — Joan Crawford delivers one of her greatest performances in Michael Curtiz’s unsparing look at class, ambition, and the all-consuming intensity of maternal love.

Jun 23, 2020 — Late in Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa’s thrillingly anomalous record of the 1964 Olympic Summer Games, the film documents one of the most taxing contests, the individual modern pentathlon, in a startling montage of still photographs, accompanied by stark sound effects....

Aug 23, 2022 — Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut, a western depicting Black cowboy heroes, allowed two of the industry’s most significant Black stars to reorient themselves as artists.

Feb 25, 2020 — In these times of Trumpidation, thirty years after its auspicious release, Paris Is Burning seems even more relevant than it did in early 1991, when I wrote the following for Black Film Review about Jennie Livingston’s phenomenal documentary on New...

Feb 21, 2024 — Combining the influence of the wuxia genre, the Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking of the 1980s, and loony comic-book futurism, these two ass-kicking fantasias are dazzling showcases of female physicality.

Aug 26, 2022 — In a pivotal early scene in this baseball classic, director Ron Shelton mischievously uses two contrasting rock tunes to comment on disparate versions of masculinity.