The Death Disc

Jan 11, 2017 — A revelatory restoration of Lewis Milestone’s underappreciated newsroom comedy accentuates the film’s punchy rhythms and breakneck banter.

Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s landmark film intermingles the sacred and profane, associating libertines with holy music, the avant-garde of the thirties, and neoclassical and biblical references.

May 5, 2009 — Irecently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given...

Jul 25, 2023 — In his five collaborations with actor Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown, Boetticher presents an unsentimental vision of honor-bound men competing and banding together in a desolate landscape ruled by chance.

Jul 22, 2021 — Quentin Tarantino’s first novel and studies of Ophuls and Melville are among this month’s new and noteworthy titles.

Jun 11, 2021 — “The whole world is dying of panicky fright.” The opening on-screen text of Todd Haynes’s Poison promises an unsettled experience. Yet these words also might as well be predicting the puritanical response to the film that erupted from conservative quarters. After winning...

Nov 29, 2017 — The National Board of Review, established in 1909 and now boasting over 100 members, has named Steven Spielberg’s The Post as the best film of 2017. The Post won’t open until December 22 and reviews are embargoed until this coming...

Oct 10, 2017 — New York. “It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the Museum of Modern Art would screen a film series called Black Intimacy mere months after the Academy Awards had three films in its Best Picture category—Fences, Hidden Figures, and eventual winner Moonlight—that mostly focused on intimate...

Oct 3, 2017 — New York. Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (reviews from Venice and Toronto) has been added to the lineup of the ongoing New York Film Festival as a Special Event. There’ll be a single screening on Friday evening.Lucrecia Martel, whose Zama is part of the festival’s Main Slate,...

Apr 14, 2026 — Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is a film about fear. That may not entirely jibe with its reputation as a biblical parody, but it might be the movie’s secret strength—why it continues to strike a nerve today. Many of...