The Watch

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...

Mar 5, 2021 — This week offers a new magazine, conversations with Guy Maddin and the great women filmmakers of the 1970s, and a new restoration of a Hong Kong classic.

Mar 3, 2021 — Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Dénes Nagy’s Natural Light compete at the Berlinale.

Feb 26, 2021 — Besides Abbas Kiarostami, Rebecca Hall, and Djibril Diop Mambéty, we’re also reading about TikTok and the greatest movie endings ever.

Jan 28, 2021 — Locarno dedicates its retrospective to the filmmaker Andrew Sarris once called a “grossly unappreciated directorial talent.”

Mar 20, 2020 — Also this week: Filmmaker and filmmakers make their work freely accessible, an appreciation of Barbara Hammer, and an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Jan 8, 2020 — A major retrospective at the Cinémathèque française has us turning to writing by Peter Wollen, Gilberto Perez, and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Nov 25, 2019 — Karyn Kusama has always been fascinated by what terrifies and startles audiences. A director who has won acclaim for her fresh, surprising spins on familiar genres—from teen horror (Jennifer’s Body) to the detective thriller (Destroyer)—she has drawn creative inspiration from masters of...

Oct 25, 2019 — When he set out to become a director in the early 1960s, Herschell Gordon Lewis wanted to work on the kinds of movies that the major studios could never dream of making. His taste for the perverse gave rise to...

Oct 8, 2019 — In 1942, Ernst Lubitsch made one of the riskiest movies of his career: a hybrid of suspense, satire, and screwball comedy that took a real-life crisis—the Nazi occupation of Poland—as its backdrop. While critics have long credited the ingenious screenplay...