A Place to Stand

Oct 8, 2025 — We remember an artist, teacher, and filmmaker who unleashed realms of depth from two-dimensional images.

Aug 2, 2024 — Along with the new Senses of Cinema, we’re reading interviews with Michael Roemer, Claire Denis, and M. Night Shyamalan.

Jun 18, 2024 — In this stylish erotic noir, Lilly and Lana Wachowski delight in destabilizing our genre and gender expectations, laying the foundation for the trans sensibility that runs through all their work.

Sep 18, 2023 — Winners and runners-up include American Fiction, The Holdovers, Dicks: The Musical, and Dear Jessi.

Jul 6, 2023 — The accomplished actor excelled at playing ordinary men facing down life’s most outrageous absurdities.

Mar 15, 2022 — The story of queerness in American cinema isn’t complete without the unusual case of These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961). Both films are based on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, inspired by an incident in which...

Jun 17, 2021 — The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience...

Oct 13, 2020 — I know I need somethingOr someone. From “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day” (1978), by Nikki Giovanni While the screen is still dark, Gladys Knight’s voice drifts in, in a strong, sincere belt: “How can I / Work out this...

Sep 11, 2019 — Following his landmark collection of photographs, The Americans, Frank made essential films about the Beats, the Stones, and his own personal tragedies.

Jan 25, 2018 — “I don’t scare easily,” begins A. A. Dowd at the A.V. Club. “So it’s a special kind of awful, a rare treat of sorts, when something comes along that actually gets past my defenses, that does more than make me...