Only the Dead

Oct 29, 2019 — Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a...

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Jul 9, 2019 — Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film Europa Europa recounts the incredible but true story of how Salomon Perel, born in 1925 in Germany to a Polish Jewish family, survived the Holocaust by posing as a pure Aryan German raised in Poland. Recruited...

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

Mar 26, 2019 — It’s the afternoon of February 8, 1964, and Ed Sullivan has assembled a gaggle of CBS ushers to talk about tomorrow night’s show, featuring the four lads from Liverpool who call themselves the Beetles—strike that, the Beatles. He needs to...

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

Mar 19, 2019 — A few weeks after Barbara Loden, the writer, director, and star of Wanda, died at age forty-eight after a long battle with cancer, Elia Kazan, her widower, was interviewed by Marguerite Duras for Cahiers du cinéma. It was 1980, and...

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Dec 28, 2018 — Ulysses S. Jenkins’s Two-Zone Transfer By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about...

Dec 7, 2018 — Christian Petzold’s films are like dances in which people circle each other but never quite connect. The most resonant moments in the German writer-director’s work are not ones of dialogue or plot development but of blocking and choreography: bodies intertwining,...