Right Now, Wrong Then

May 17, 2022 — Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

Aug 31, 2021 — Cary Joji Fukunaga’s devastating child-soldier movie unflinchingly captures the shock of war without forsaking the complexity of human experience.

Jan 29, 2020 — It is almost impossible to discuss Sidney Lumet’s Cold War thriller Fail Safe without also considering its more financially successful cinematic foil and fellow 1964 Columbia Pictures release, Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to...

Jul 3, 2019 — Punk has been tamed, punk has been neutered, punk has been domesticated. The album The Stooges is fifty years old this August, and the music of omnidirectional bile and antiauthoritarianism that it anticipated has been museumified, the subject of a...

Jun 24, 2019 — A work of rapturous energy, John Cameron Mitchell’s beloved debut feature is a freewheeling rock-and-roll musical suffused with heartbreak and pleasure.

Jan 29, 2019 — In the Heat of the Night (1967) opens with an air of mystery, of outsiderness winding its way into the small town of Sparta, Mississippi, a place that right away seems heavy with a sense of what belongs and what...

Dec 18, 2018 — Whatever your cinephilic interest—cinematography, acting, criticism—there’ll likely be a new book to take with you into the holidays.

Oct 30, 2018 — Ridiculous on the outside but full of truth on the inside, Rob Reiner’s fairy-tale classic is a childhood touchstone for generations of movie lovers.

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

May 17, 2018 — Gaspar Noé’s nightmare party movie takes the top prize.