Skin Deep

Jul 24, 2017 — On Friday, we posted an entry on all that’s known—and speculated—about the seventy-fourth edition of the the Venice International Film Festival running from August 30 through September 9. Over the weekend the festival filled out the juries. Annette Bening will...

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...

May 31, 2017 — Long difficult to see, this transgressive silent masterpiece draws on a wide range of aesthetic influences to push against the boundaries of film form.

May 25, 2017 — “The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has ever a heist gone quite so wrong to quite such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Bouncing wildly...

May 23, 2017 — In one of the first major films to confront the contemporary refugee crisis in Europe, Jacques Audiard brings a genre-busting approach to an explosive subject.

May 22, 2017 — Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer “makes the absurd, amazing The Lobster seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison,” declares Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “A film of clean hands, cold heart, and near-Satanic horror, it...

Apr 2, 2017 — What defines noir acting? In her latest Dark Passages column, Imogen Sara Smith examines the stylistic variety in some of the genre’s most iconic male performances, including Burt Lancaster in The Killers and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly.

Jan 16, 2017 — Jack Garfein’s no-holds-barred account of sexual assault and trauma captures the volatile sensibility of the Actors Studio.

Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.

Oct 18, 2016 — Guillermo del Toro’s anti–Wizard of Oz refracts the surreal traumas of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of a young girl.