Happy End

Jul 28, 2022 — Directing the Monkees in Head and Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, Rafelson was a key figure of the New Hollywood.

Feb 15, 2022 — Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.

Nov 29, 2021 — The composer and lyricist who reinvented the American musical was “more of a film buff than a theater buff.”

Nov 22, 2021 — Songbook Tootsie is a film about love and desire. Audiences are prone to forgetting this amid the controversies that have arisen around its gender-crossing conceit. Back in 1982, the film emerged as one of the decade’s prestige comedies: it was...

Oct 20, 2021 — This uncanny tale of existential anxiety stands out as the most rigorously pared-down American science-fiction film of the 1950s.

Sep 23, 2021 — Gina Prince-Bythewood’s iconic debut portrays Black love without forcing its heroine to compromise herself and her ambitions.

Sep 21, 2021 — Johnnie To pays homage to Akira Kurosawa in this martial arts drama about the virtue of struggle and self-improvement.

Jul 23, 2021 — Deep Dives In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own...

Jul 16, 2021 — The spotlight this week is on Sara Driver, Jacques Tati, Bill Duke, Lizzie Borden, and Nobuhiko Obayashi.

Dec 3, 2020 — First Person A dedicated movie buff from my teenage years onward, and an assiduous if not pedantic completist forever seeking out obscure backlist items by favorite auteurs, such as that rare screening of George Cukor’s The Model and the Marriage...