Before the Night

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

May 7, 2021 — The house on Walnut Road was and still is, among other things, a movie house. That becomes vividly clear in Michael Koresky’s searching and tender new memoir, Films of Endearment, in which he returns to this beloved childhood home several times over the...

May 1, 2021 — Filmmaking, at its best, has always sought to bear witness to, and create new perspectives on, our lived realities. But no one has mined the eccentric possibilities of the cinematic medium to address the vertiginous social and cultural changes borne...

Mar 31, 2021 — It has seemed to me for a long time that there is far too little screaming about Albert Brooks. It has seemed that way to all of his staunchest fans, who secretly relish being among the evolved few who know...

Feb 24, 2021 — He never really pushes that cart, does he? Despite the film’s title, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the mournfully persistent protagonist of Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 debut feature, Man Push Cart, is almost always seen pulling his cart through the nighttime streets of...

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Jan 15, 2021 — Songbook 1.There is music in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking that arises from the home itself. It sounds like eddies of conversation around a kitchen counter, as persistent as the crackle of frying oil. It sounds like the patter, so similar...

Dec 8, 2020 — Swiss-Moroccan filmmaker Halima Ouardiri’s short documentary Mutts is a captivating portrait of a shelter for stray dogs in Morocco, elegantly shot in a sunbaked color palette of rich golds and browns. The film, which makes its premiere on the Criterion Channel this week in...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Oct 13, 2020 — I know I need somethingOr someone. From “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day” (1978), by Nikki Giovanni While the screen is still dark, Gladys Knight’s voice drifts in, in a strong, sincere belt: “How can I / Work out this...