Set It Off

Jul 24, 2020 — On our minds this week: Bruce Lee’s legacy, Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopia, Hitchcock’s hands, and those Black Lives Matter movie lists.

Aug 20, 2019 — With The Hired Hand, Fonda created a classic of the new era ushered in by Easy Rider.

May 21, 2019 — Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) is one of the great films about middle-aged loneliness, specifically—though not exclusively—as women feel it. It’s not a dating movie, though there’s dating in it. And it’s not a feeling-sorry-for-oneself movie, though there are...

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...

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...

May 21, 2018 — W hether she’s pushing herself to new heights on stage and screen or nurturing her passions as a painter and poet, Juliette Binoche is as creatively voracious now as she’s ever been. Her combination of strength and disarming vulnerability as...

May 13, 2018 — Critics may differ on Jia’s sprawling gangster movie, but all agree that Zhao Tao is outstanding.

Nov 6, 2017 — “One of the disorientations of where we’re at—the obliterative sucking splotch of a present tense in which we now all live—is that it feels simultaneously like a malign mischance and like something we should have seen coming a mile off,”...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Sean Baker follows his 2015 breakout feature Tangerine with another high-energy movie about people whose imaginations are undaunted by living on the margins,” begins Amy Taubin, introducing her interview with the director for Film Comment. “In The Florida Project, six-year-old...

Jun 20, 2017 — “Bertrand Tavernier joins a growing list of filmmakers who've made what amounts to an epic video essay with My Journey Through French Cinema, a three-hour-plus leap into notable French filmmaking from roughly 1930 to 1980,” writes Clayton Dillard at Slant....