The Lesson

Jun 25, 2024 — Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

Nov 27, 2018 — With The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles created a model of period filmmaking, lightly deploying historical signifiers while focusing on the haunting power of his actors’ faces.

Dec 2, 2022 — We’re sorting through the Sight and Sound poll and reading about Paweł Łoziński, the Sankofa Collective, and the first films ever made.

May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...

Jun 12, 2018 — Among the six movies Lino Brocka directed between 1974 and ’76, there were three landmark works that changed the course of his career and that of Philippine cinema: Weighed but Found Wanting (1974), Manila in the Claws of Light (1975),...

Jan 28, 2014 — Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Sep 30, 2017 — Serge Bozon’s Mrs. Hyde premiered in Locarno in August, when we gathered a first round of reviews. It screens once more tomorrow (October 1) as part of the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate, and Bozon and his star, Isabelle...

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 24, 2017 — “Cinema lost one of its pre-eminent pioneers when Abbas Kiarostami died on July 4, 2016,” writes Giovanni Marchini Camia at the Film Stage, where he notes that 24 Frames “was as good as finished” at the time of his passing....