The Beast Within

Jan 18, 2019 — Dark Passages Getting old, in Hollywood, is at least a misfortune, if not a crime. But film noir had plenty of room for actors who looked the worse for wear, whose mileage showed on their faces, whose youth was less...

Mar 12, 2018 — When the SXSW Film Festival presented the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One last night, “technical difficulties KO’ed the sound for the second time in a row, bringing the dizzying, VFX-fueled video game adventure to a grinding halt...

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Oct 1, 2017 — Last week, Deadline’s Amanda N’Duka reported that Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) “has signed on to direct an upcoming biopic on Rosa Parks, which will center on the decade before her seminal moment on a Montgomery bus, when Parks,...

Jul 17, 2017 — “Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a...

May 25, 2017 — “Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary,” begins Jay Weissberg in Variety. “His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy,...

May 21, 2017 — Tonight, Sunday, May 21, 2017, Twin Peaks returns, just as Laura Palmer (may have) predicted it would twenty-five years ago, give or take. Eighteen one-hour episodes, all directed by David Lynch and cowritten with the show’s original co-creator, Mark Frost....

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

Jan 2, 2020 — Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Chloé Zhao, and Joanna Hogg are among the many directors ready to roll out their latest features.

Jan 3, 2023 — A work of pure, rigorous enchantment, the final film in Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” employs old-fashioned technical wizardry to bring about its wall-to-wall visual astonishments.