The Glory of Life

Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...

Nov 17, 2015 — Satyajit Ray began his filmmaking career by offering a vision of the young Apu, the character he would go on to follow throughout the three films of his stunning breakthrough epic.

Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.

Aug 18, 2010 — Before Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus showed up on American and European screens in 1959, what would later be known as the “art film” came in only a few shades of glum: Bergmanesque existentialism, Japanese samurai tragedy, stories of Italian peasant...

Apr 26, 2010 — In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,...

Jan 18, 2010 — Steven Soderbergh’s Che depicts the two military campaigns that defined the rise and fall of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, who became in death a global icon of militant leftism—and of inchoate adolescent rebellion. As the latter,...

Sep 18, 2025 — This month’s programs offer a feast of horror, including a John Carpenter retrospective and a collection of the most terrifying films of the 2000s.

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.

Jun 22, 2023 — Our latest slate of programs dives into one of science fiction’s favorite themes, the film career of one of rock and roll’s greatest icons, and midcentury pulp from across the Atlantic.

Feb 10, 2020 — The ragman’s son became one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, working most memorably with Wilder, Minnelli, and Kubrick.