Life After People

Sep 8, 2023 — We’re celebrating Ousmane Sembène’s centennial, reading interviews with Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Kasi Lemmons, and watching soundies.

Aug 29, 2023 — Exalting Black women’s self-invention with DIY effervescence, Drylongso (1998) is a gorgeously generous study of friendship, creativity, violence, and survival. The multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith developed the idea for the project from her habit of taking Polaroid photographs. Shot on...

Aug 14, 2023 — Defying pressure from Iran, Locarno didn’t just screen Ali Ahmadzadeh’s Critical Zone; the festival also gave it its top award.

Aug 11, 2023 — Great as they are, there was a lot more to Hurricane Billy than The French Connection and The Exorcist.

Aug 10, 2023 — “You’re the company I waited so long for,” Dr. Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) says to her three Self Replicating Automatons in Teknolust (2002), artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s sci-fi farce about a scientist’s well-meaning pursuit of artificial life. Stone’s color-coded clones...

Aug 7, 2023 — In a tribute to Elvis Presley that aired on Turner Classic Movies, Kurt Russell says that “an Elvis movie is always worth watching because of Elvis.” This insight gets at a core truth about a much maligned and mostly dismissed...

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

Jul 25, 2023 — A master class in dramatic tension and pacing, Carl Franklin’s neonoir masterpiece explores the desperate energy and desperate deeds that fuel real crime.

Jul 25, 2023 — Venice packs more than a few surprises, and Toronto’s announced sixty Gala and Special Presentations.

Jul 6, 2023 — The accomplished actor excelled at playing ordinary men facing down life’s most outrageous absurdities.