Reflections on Black

Sep 24, 2014 — Roman Polanski’s dark vision is the perfect fit for Shakespeare’s grim tale of treachery and ambition.

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.”

Oct 28, 2014 — What you hear is as crucial—and as funny—as what you see in Tati’s films.

Aug 8, 2017 — The disheveled drifter at the heart of Mike Leigh’s 1993 masterpiece collides with a disturbed young man in this brilliantly acted, semi-screwball scene.

Sep 17, 2021 — New issues of Film Quarterly and Animus and a conversation with Liv Ullmann and Jessica Chastain are among this week’s highlights.

Jun 22, 2021 — This month’s roundup of new and noteworthy titles opens with “a counterfactual history of the movies.”

Jul 19, 2021 — When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously...

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Apr 12, 2019 — This week sees further remembrances of Agnès Varda, reflections on Godard then and now, and appreciations of a vital but too often overlooked filmmaker, Nelly Kaplan.

Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...