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Feb 26, 2020 — Before making history last year as the first black woman director to compete at Cannes, Mati Diop had been spending the previous ten years articulating her unique vision in a series of five acclaimed short films. The praise Diop has...

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Feb 21, 2020 — Songbook “In an instant, I remembered everything.” The Cure, “The Walk” It’s the mid-1980s, and a student in a black leather jacket walks down the hall of Polytechnic of North London. Her hair is dyed a shocking orange, maybe to...

Feb 12, 2020 — If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of  the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. You grew up amid the reverberation of past earthquakes—all their...

Feb 11, 2020 — The most deeply personal film of Alfonso Cuarón’s career, Roma imbues the director’s own childhood memories with the epic sweep of history. But for all the technical virtuosity and monumental scale on display in its set pieces, the movie—which joins...

Feb 5, 2020 — Performances Judy Davis chomps softly into Naked Lunch: into twisted behavior, into the nuanced meat of the moment, into the juicy black center of the psychic abyss. Bombed-out but supernally alert and incongruously amused, she injects a syringe into her...

Jan 28, 2020 — Motherhood is a recurring subject in the films of Pedro Almodóvar. The mothers in his movies are fierce, passionate, and resourceful—often in varying combinations, and to varying extremes. In Almodóvar’s darkly satirical fourth feature, What Have I Done to Deserve...

Jan 24, 2020 — This week we’re looking at new work from Víctor Erice, the varied oeuvre of Agnès Varda, the cinematic lighthouse, the making of Before Sunrise, and more.

Jan 21, 2020 — Melancholy and offbeat, Anna Mantzaris’s stop-motion animated short Good Intentions tells the tale of a woman involved in a hit-and-run accident that sparks a chain of strange occurrences. Using chubby-cheeked felt puppets that might suggest a more charming, whimsical type of story,...

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...