The Last Stand

Nov 15, 1999 — Michael Powell’s controversial late film makes the cinema spectator’s own voyeurism shockingly obvious.

Jan 11, 1999 — This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

Jan 5, 1993 — All right, I’ll just say it. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most sublimely irreverent, most jaw-droppingly hysterical movie of the last twenty years. How many films, after all, have Knights who say “Ni!,” filth-eating peasants, and 160...

Jan 7, 1991 — Roman Polanski’s riposte to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was greeted as a brilliant, grisly potboiler that gave the thirty-two-year-old Polish filmmaker commercial entry to the West.

Mar 5, 1990 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterwork is one of the greatest portraits of old age and loneliness ever brought to the screen.

Jul 21, 2026 — Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed. Unlike Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, Stanton’s character hasn’t been discussed, chewed over, anticipated, and foreshadowed for...

Apr 17, 2026 — From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth...

Nov 26, 2024 — In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.

Oct 23, 2024 — This once-maligned horror film is an unsparing exploration of sexual violence, remarkably centered on a complex, fully realized female protagonist, played courageously by Barbara Hershey.

Jun 11, 2024 — A radically strange, postmodern adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is grounded by a sweaty, seething, meaty eroticism—a confrontational sexuality that remains bracing.