The Important Man

Dec 12, 2025 — This week: Bi Gan, Radu Jude, a new Film Quarterly, and of course, more year-end lists and polls.

Jun 21, 2024 — We open with an Italian neorealist classic, steer through ’70s-era paranoia, and wrap with a blast of gnarly rock ’n’ roll.

Jan 31, 2024 — MoMA presents a series of musicals, comedies, and melodramas injected with Buñuel’s singular surrealist vision.

Aug 3, 2021 — With two short films and his acclaimed debut feature, No Data Plan, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Filipino American filmmaker discusses his vision of the immigrant experience.

Aug 11, 2020 — I’ve often found that the most successful short films and short stories apply what Ernest Hemingway called the “iceberg theory,” distilling a larger narrative into a very specific moment that allows audiences to infer the bigger picture in their own...

Mar 6, 2020 — Above photo: © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLCIn America, black musical genius has never been in short supply, though it hasn’t always been recognized or fairly compensated. Even a casual glance at the résumé of formally trained composer, producer, and arranger...

Nov 22, 2017 — We begin with the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time, Chris Wisniewski’s, on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971). The focus here is on “a sequence that seems at first ordinary and unravels under scrutiny,...

Jun 14, 2017 — This weekend marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Monterey International Pop Festival, “a watershed mega-concert that introduced America to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar; and also provided the first big-time platform for Janis Joplin and Otis...

May 20, 2017 — “If he hadn’t already laid claim to the title of king of the cringe-inducing confrontation and nabob of the nervous laugh with the withering Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund truly anoints himself with The Square, an excoriating razor-burn of a movie...

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.