Climax

Jan 3, 2022 — Both as an art and a business, cinema faces serious challenges, but the past year offers reasons for optimism.

Dec 17, 2021 — A Nicole Brenez dossier and writing on Melvin Van Peebles and Nicolas Cage are among this week’s highlights.

Dec 7, 2021 — Regina King’s feature-film directorial debut envisions the true-life convergence of four prominent Black figures with empathy and moral urgency.

Nov 22, 2021 — Songbook Tootsie is a film about love and desire. Audiences are prone to forgetting this amid the controversies that have arisen around its gender-crossing conceit. Back in 1982, the film emerged as one of the decade’s prestige comedies: it was...

Oct 27, 2021 — Stephen Winter’s subversive, imaginative work simultaneously celebrates Black queer culture and fiercely threatens cinematic and societal conventions. In conversation as in his work, the director, producer, and writer deftly balances a warm wit with strikingly incisive honesty. Winter has played...

Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.

May 12, 2021 — The actor, director, and producer known for his work with Welles, Hitchcock, Chaplin, and Renoir was 106.

Apr 19, 2021 — What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics....

Apr 13, 2021 — To fall deeply in love means to take a risk, and no romantic movie is riskier than History Is Made at Night (1937). Producer Walter Wanger came up with the very grand and suggestive title, but he had only two...

Apr 9, 2021 — Uncovering “The Naked City,” Bruce Goldstein’s scintillating chronicle of The Naked City’s groundbreaking New York location shoot, is more than the best “where-they-filmed-it” doc ever made. As Goldstein wittily traces director Jules Dassin’s Gotham roots and influences, this twenty-three-minute documentary—now...