Once Is Never

Sep 13, 2004 — The following piece by Sony Pictures Classics cofounder and copresident Michael Barker, who picked up Slacker for Orion Classics in 1991, originally appeared in the program for the 2001 Austin Film Society event Slacker: A Ten-Year Reunion. What I’ve found...

Dec 22, 1992 — With a script by Graham Greene, Carol Reed’s thriller plays upon the classic themes of trust, innocence, betrayal, and truth through the lens of a precocious eight-year-old.

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...

Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.

Jul 17, 2026 — Some early reviews raise a few objections, but for the most part, Nolan is wowing critics with his grandest vision yet.

Jul 24, 2025 — Directed by Jack Bond, It Couldn’t Happen Here is a strange and compelling document of the synth-pop duo at the height of their success, as well as a darkly absurdist send-up of provincial England in the Thatcher era.

Jul 2, 2024 — Self-destruction is not only an aesthetic but its own subject matter in Sam Peckinpah’s deeply elegiac western, a towering masterpiece that examines American power and greed.

Nov 22, 2022 — Spike Lee’s transcendent portrait of an American hero is an urgent call for the nation to live up to everything it claims to be.

Nov 16, 2021 — Tsui Hark’s epic martial-arts saga revolutionized Hong Kong cinema by presenting a complex portrait of modern Chinese history and setting a gold standard in action choreography.

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.