Middle of the Night

Oct 12, 2021 — In Raoul Walsh’s elegy for the Depression-era archetype of the noble outlaw, Humphrey Bogart plays an old-fashioned desperado who has outlived his time.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles takes aim at Hollywood’s way of representing race in this blistering satire about a white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned Black overnight.

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

Sep 20, 2019 — In the winter of 1981, when I was young, I fell madly in love with a handsome poet. About two weeks into our affaire de cœur, we went to the Thalia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see...

Feb 5, 2019 — Shame (1968) is one of the great neglected films from Ingmar Bergman’s midcareer creative explosion. It builds on and surpasses the two Bergman films that immediately preceded it: the avant-garde milestone Persona (1966) and the surreal shocker Hour of the...

Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...

Sep 10, 2018 — One of the pleasures of programming a new short-and-feature pairing every week on the Criterion Channel is getting to celebrate the artistic freedom that short films offer emerging artists. With tighter run times and smaller budgets, the form comes with...

Apr 9, 2018 — The retrospective of work by Lucrecia Martel at the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be the first of many around the country and abroad in the coming weeks, so we’ll take a closer look in a separate entry on...

Apr 5, 2018 — Locarno in Los Angeles, the series curated by Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk and co-artistic director Robert Koehler that brings a batch of the best films screened last summer at the increasingly vital Swiss festival, opens today and runs through...

Mar 15, 2018 — New York. Film Forum’s series, entitled simply Michel Piccoli, opens tomorrow and runs through March 22. “It’s surprisingly hard to think of an American equivalent for Piccoli,” writes Mike D’Angelo in the Village Voice. “He never exudes the wised-up, electrifying...