The Lost Letter

Dec 19, 2025 — This week: Kubrick conspiracies, Malickian movies, Spike Lee’s musical moments, and a talk with Rebecca Hall.

Jun 14, 2024 — Featured this week are a breakthrough lesbian comedy, a Native American road movie, and a portrait of a Palestinian family.

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Jan 19, 2023 — The frequent collaborators talk about their close friendship, the paths that led them to each other, and the artistic values they share.

Mar 25, 2022 — With its rambling Victorian mansions and seedy charms, the once-exclusive area of downtown Los Angeles was film noir’s favorite neighborhood.

Jul 6, 2021 — The fourth of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seven features is his most oneiric and resistant to interpretation, drawing from the director’s own childhood memories to create a fluid sense of history.

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

Apr 15, 2019 — She was known as “a professional innocent”—until Persona (1966) revealed a complex emotional intelligence.

Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...

Dec 19, 2017 — Following the first rounds up titles slated for the Panorama and Competition programs, the Berlin International Film Festival now presents sixteen titles lined up for Generation, its section for younger viewers. This time around, we have descriptions from the Berlinale.Generation 14plus303, directed by Hans Weingartner. World premiere. 303 tells...