The Old Way

Mar 1, 2022 — The first film I saw at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival opens on the image of a freshly dug grave. Shovelfuls of earth fall into the open pit as two doctors stand above it, lamenting the loss of yet...

Feb 22, 2022 — Acting, that undefinable amalgam of technique, persona, and plain hard work, dominates this month’s roundup.

Feb 22, 2022 — The fourth feature by the Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui devastatingly lays bare the conditions that spurred hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee after the fall of Saigon.

Feb 9, 2022 — The Learning Tree may have been Gordon Parks’s first feature film as a director, but by the time filming began in the fall of 1968, Parks already had almost three decades of experience behind a camera. In 1940, the self-taught...

Feb 8, 2022 — A Prohibition-era gangster saga, the Coen brothers’ third feature is an enigmatic fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Jan 12, 2022 — Gifted with the looks and suavity of a young Elvis, the “Wicked Game” crooner shares with David Lynch an obsession with 1950s Americana—and a knowledge of the darkness at its heart.

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.

Nov 16, 2021 — Starting with his first movie, in 1949, the Cantonese folk hero became a pop-culture phenomenon whose personality evolved to suit the times.

Oct 15, 2021 — There is a gloriously unaffected vibe about Gina Prince-Bythewood. Cerebral and sublime, casually beautiful and laser-focused, she has written and directed impressive television and film for the past twenty-plus years with equal parts rigor and joy. And she has achieved...