The Final Year

Apr 24, 2006 — M ade in 1965 and still considered by many to be Marco Bellocchio’s masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket foreshadows the years of student protest in a family tragedy bordering on horror. This seminal first feature catapulted the twenty-six-year-old Bellocchio to...

Nov 21, 2005 — Why would ambitious filmmakers simply film an opera? Many admirers of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have assumed that their decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by the...

May 22, 2026 — This week brings a look back at Cronenberg’s Crash and conversations with Boots Riley and Wallace Shawn.

Dec 16, 2025 — Paul Reubens’s iconic character comes to cinematic life in this collaboration with director Tim Burton, who creates an on-screen world that evokes the unbridled joy and overwhelming terror of childhood.

Jul 22, 2025 — An era-defining reckoning with the sexual revolution, Mike Nichols’s controversial drama develops a rigorous form for analyzing what we have recently come to call “toxic masculinity.”

Apr 29, 2025 — In this exuberant and moving portrait of a Brooklyn sex worker, Sean Baker draws on themes he has explored throughout his career, depicting the workaday grind of twenty-first-century American existence with biting humor and clear-eyed humanity.

Apr 7, 2025 — He played Iceman, Jim Morrison, Doc Holliday, and even Batman as no one else would or could have.

Mar 18, 2025 — In what he described as his “first serious drama,” Charlie Chaplin channeled the influence of modernist literature, foreign cinema, and his European travels into a work of striking formal sophistication.

Jan 31, 2024 — Shifting recklessly between realism and surrealism, this drug-fueled odyssey from director Danny Boyle is a propulsive satire of depleted masculinity in urban Scotland.

Dec 12, 2023 — Deep Dives Beloved for his poetic observations of domestic life and intergenerational conflict, Yasujiro Ozu is an icon of international art-house cinema whose patient, exquisitely restrained style has influenced filmmakers around the world. But even though he directed more than...