The Medium

Nov 27, 2010 — The New Jersey resort town of Atlantic City provides the backdrop for two distinctive films made at opposite ends of the seventies: Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, released in 1981. That decade...

Apr 22, 2010 — It’s easy to get anxious about the place of Jean-Luc Godard in our cultural slipstream. He’s held a top-shelf slot of honor that has seemed unassailable for nearly sixty years, but sometimes I fear that his currency is becoming drastically...

Jun 23, 2003 — Alain Resnais’s antidocumentary never purports to “document” the heinous realities of the Holocaust; instead, it interrogates our responses.

Jul 1, 1990 — Molded by Alfred Hitchcock’s direction and David O. Selznick’s editing, the film plays upon the conventions of the Gothic melodrama without ever losing its characters’ humanity.

Feb 8, 1988 — Sidney Lumet’s courtroom drama explores the process of law in human hands, where prejudice, fear, weakness, and even weather can divert the carriage of justice.

Dec 13, 2023 — In June 2023—six months after the release of his Oscar-winning, stop-motion, antifascist-fable version of Pinocchio—Guillermo del Toro found himself speaking to an audience at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, an underground-comix-influenced, hand-drawn-looking cartoon...

Aug 11, 2023 — Back in the early 1980s, people were still trying to figure hip-hop out.Now in its fiftieth year, this cultural movement built by DJs, rappers, break dancers, and graffiti writers began in New York, spreading from the South Bronx to the...

Sep 17, 2019 — Fusing the melodrama of Douglas Sirk and the ballyhoo of William Castle, John Waters’ sixth feature, Polyester (1981), was a departure from the scrofulous 16 mm mode of production he had made his cult name plying to midnight-movie crowds in...

May 31, 2019 — Cannes 2019 Cannes has been top dog in the festival world as long as anyone can remember. It was originally set to launch in 1939 as a conscious political reply by liberal democracy to the success of Mussolini in establishing...

Aug 26, 2016 — ClippingsLast weekend, in conjunction with his new album, Blonde, musician and noted cinephile Frank Ocean released a limited-edition zine titled Boys Don’t Cry, which featured a list of his favorite films. Chungking Express, Eraserhead, Blood Simple, Solaris, Paris, Texas, and...