The Test

Aug 15, 2023 — Wayne Wang is perhaps best known as a cinematic chameleon. Working both inside and outside of the Hollywood ecosystem, he has consistently demonstrated a restless curiosity about a wide range of cultures and filmic traditions. In addition to directing two...

Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...

Sep 22, 2021 — Writer-director John Huston blasted the fusty pieties that pervaded big-studio filmmaking in the post-Code era, whether as the progenitor of film noir with The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the brainy daredevil who threaded critiques of frontier capitalism, gold lust, and...

Feb 4, 2019 — Performances The first movie that Nicolas Roeg and Theresa Russell made together, Bad Timing (1980), was denounced by its distributor, the Rank Organisation, as a “sick film made by sick people for sick people,” which may sound to some like...

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

Feb 17, 2015 — It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-­five­-year career as a writer­-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes...

Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...

Mar 5, 2021 — Here’s an overview of what critics have been saying about this year’s winners of the Berlinale’s top awards.

May 12, 2026 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth...

Oct 27, 2025 — The self-trained filmmaker examined postindependence Nigerien society in morality tales that showcased his visual ingenuity and sly sense of humor.