The Base

May 21, 2025 — The exiled American director of Try and Get Me! and Hell Drivers depicted crime and violence as the inevitable results of capitalist competition.

Oct 31, 2024 — The BAM series focuses on filmmakers who “turn the visual language of the silents to new purposes.”

Apr 26, 2024 — The director of Human Resources (1999), Time Out (2001), and The Class (2008) has died at sixty-three.

Apr 22, 2024 — Fiercely committed to the possibilities of political art, the trailblazing director talks about how her intersectional understanding of feminism imbues her films, three of which are now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Dec 8, 2023 — Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage), the jittery protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 2003 crime comedy Matchstick Men, doesn’t like to think of himself as a common crook. “I’m a con artist,” he insists, and—in a frenzy of self-justification—further explains: “They give me...

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

May 17, 2023 — Now that Jeanne du Barry has opened this year’s edition, critics look ahead to the movies they’re anticipating most.

Oct 28, 2022 — The role of the vampire has given talented actors throughout film history—from Bela Lugosi to Catherine Deneuve—the chance to embody physical and moral extremity.

Mar 11, 2022 — This week’s roundup roams from pre-Code Hollywood to the New Hollywood of the 1970s.

Feb 15, 2022 — Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.