Out West

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Mar 29, 2013 — When the world’s favorite comedian asked his audience to see him as a sociopathic serial killer, he was venturing where cinema had barely dared to tread.

Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.

Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.

Jan 15, 2013 — Despite the acclaim, Volker Schlöndorff always felt his adaptation of Günter Grass’s novel was incomplete. Thirty years later, he set to work on his director’s cut.

Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Oct 2, 2012 — Set in 1960s Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai’s ravishing masterpiece is both a love song to a city and a human romance of epic intimacy.

Aug 30, 2012 — In the 1960s, Mailer, already a literary legend, was inspired by the avant-garde film movement to take a stab at his own, anti-Warholian underground cinema.

Aug 28, 2012 — The boy Quadrophenia’s Jimmy was based on (or was he?) talks to us about the mod life.