The Bad Guys

Jul 14, 2020 — Bruce Lee seemed born to be on-screen. At three months old, he appeared as an infant in a Hong Kong movie called Golden Gate Girl (1941). After he died suddenly of cerebral edema in 1973 at the age of thirty-two,...

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

Jan 20, 2015 — Here he is: the real, unreal Guy Maddin, in his phantasmagorical, polymathic stew of sex, memory, and dreams.

May 24, 2011 — In 1938, Charles Chaplin deposited with the Library of Congress a script for a film to be called The Dictator, and told the press it was a project in which he would play a double role. He clearly had Hitler...

Jul 22, 2026 — The filmmaker looks back on the experiences that have shaped his creative life, including his time in art school, his work as a graphic designer and music-video director, and his early interest in documentary cinema.

Apr 20, 2021 — 1. “I Felt Nothing” In September 2019, about halfway between claiming the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and earning multiple Oscar nominations in January 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite was briefly upstaged by a movie from the director’s past....

Jan 18, 2019 — Dark Passages Getting old, in Hollywood, is at least a misfortune, if not a crime. But film noir had plenty of room for actors who looked the worse for wear, whose mileage showed on their faces, whose youth was less...

Aug 2, 2017 — “Jonathan Demme loved people,” begins Matt Prigge, writing for Metro US. “There are villains in his movies—most notably that charming aesthete Hannibal Lecter, who loved people, too, only as food. And his biggest hits were about strife: the hunt for...

Jul 24, 2017 — “It seems, at first, like an impossible caper,” begins Jordan Hoffman, writing for the Guardian. “Can Steven Soderbergh bring something new to the heist genre after his outstanding Oceans trilogy? The answer, as always, is to have faith in the...

Nov 15, 2011 — “The day I can buy toilet paper in a Polish store, I’ll discuss politics,” Krzysztof Kieślowski told an interviewer in 1989, as he brushed aside a question. He was speaking at the Montreal Film Festival, where he was serving on...