On the Beat

May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.

Dec 23, 2017 — Let’s first take a quick break from 2017 and look back fifty years (as I suspect we’ll be doing a lot in 2018). For Little White Lies, Justine Smith has been rifling through various archives and has put together a...

Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.

Oct 25, 2011 — The central theme of the film is that the life force inherent in this music is always with us, but you are an idiot if you want to turn on the wayback machine and relive these days.

Oct 19, 2016 — Martha Karsh, editor of The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night: A Private Archive, published in September by Phaidon, talks about her family’s Beatlemania and assembling a book about the world’s most famous rock band.

Jul 18, 2014 — The annual Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, has become the hottest showcase for the latest restorations of classic and overlooked films from around the world. So we were thrilled that they decided to show our restoration of Richard Lester’s...

Feb 5, 2020 — Performances Judy Davis chomps softly into Naked Lunch: into twisted behavior, into the nuanced meat of the moment, into the juicy black center of the psychic abyss. Bombed-out but supernally alert and incongruously amused, she injects a syringe into her...

Oct 19, 2009 — Though known primarily for her wildly varied, continent-hopping features (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, The Namesake), Indian director Mira Nair has for the past three decades also been forging a parallel career of short filmmaking. Both fiction (Migration, How...

Jan 15, 2017 — To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal.

Sep 28, 2022 — Uday Shankar’s fantastical dance epic embodies a progressive, postcolonial Indian aesthetic that is decades ahead of its time.