The Making of a Man

Jul 9, 2019 — Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film Europa Europa recounts the incredible but true story of how Salomon Perel, born in 1925 in Germany to a Polish Jewish family, survived the Holocaust by posing as a pure Aryan German raised in Poland. Recruited...

May 2, 2019 — When I first saw My Brilliant Career, when it was released in New York in 1980, I was ignorant of director “Gill” Armstrong. I assumed she was a man, because at the time I could count the female directors I...

Apr 7, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, the Janus Films touring retrospective of Wim Wenders’s work is making a stop at the Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, to screen the iconic German director’s 1984 masterpiece Paris, Texas. Based on a script by award-winning...

Feb 15, 2012 — Comedy evolves. We long ago bid adieu to the physical acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the wisecracks of Bob Hope, the witty repartee of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. The now-reigning comedy of embarrassment, seen in the films of Judd Apatow...

Jan 18, 2011 — By 1963, when he started filming Shock Corridor on a rented soundstage, Samuel Fuller had come ruefully and puckishly to view himself as a “Lindy,” a diminutive for Charles Lindbergh designating a prostitute who, like the famous aviator, operates solo,...

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

Mar 18, 2026 — This month’s highlights include a collection of corporate thrillers, a survey of an emerging generation of trans auteurs, and a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with Mary Bronstein.

Feb 5, 2026 — In London, the BFI is marking the hundredth anniversary of Wajda’s birth with a series of eighteen films.

Jul 31, 2025 — Series celebrating a giant of American cinema are on in Boston, Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.