Be Great!

Feb 21, 2025 — This week we’re revisiting work by Zeinabu irene Davis, Chantal Akerman, Claude Lanzmann, Wang Bing, and Joan Micklin Silver.

Feb 21, 2025 — The pioneer of African cinema carried “the inventive temperament of a dreamer armed with a firm political orientation.”

Feb 19, 2025 — Gus Van Sant’s lyrical exploration of addiction and faith—adapted from an autobiographical novel by James Fogle—influenced cinematic drug depictions throughout the nineties and helped to initiate a wave of American independent filmmaking.

Feb 18, 2025 — In her mainstream breakthrough, director Joan Micklin Silver envisions New York City through the eyes of a complicated, searching woman trying to figure out her place in the world.

Feb 5, 2025 — Starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, the film is a vivid record of the art life in 1970s New York.

Jan 28, 2025 — We’re reading about Wes Anderson and David Cronenberg and looking forward to books on David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar.

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

Jan 15, 2025 — Edward Berger’s improbably entertaining follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) scores twelve.

Jan 14, 2025 — In his only directorial effort for the big screen, Richard Pryor takes the raw stuff of his life and alchemizes it as art, demonstrating the humor and vulnerability that made him a towering figure in American culture.

Jan 14, 2025 — In this digressive, intensely interior masterpiece, Jean Eustache mines the dramas of his past romances while also capturing the disillusionment of young Parisians in the aftermath of May 1968.