if….

May 9, 1994 — The importance of Two English Girls lies in its sheer vitality. The film is an extraordinary cinematic conjuring trick in which Truffaut draws the viewer both physically and visually into his own personal pleasures. He does this on a multitude...

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

May 25, 1992 — If Max Ophuls hadn’t cooled his heels in Hollywood to flee the Nazis, his name might have conjured only the most unintelligible of foreign cinema—vague and inaccessible to the average American filmgoer. But in 1948 Ophuls was given an opportunity...

Dec 2, 1991 — Director Akira Kurosawa had wanted to make Throne of Blood for some time. “After finishing Rashomon [in 1950] I wanted to do something with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but just about that time Orson Welles’s version was announced, so I postponed mine.”...

Jan 4, 1988 — The Secret Agent (1936) came to life in the prime of Alfred Hitchcock’s British period. It arrived between the popular triumph of The 39 Steps and the box-office rejection of Sabotage, a more daringly downbeat work. Secret Agent partakes of...

Dec 11, 1986 — If events had turned out differently, Orson Welles’s second film might well be widely regarded as “the greatest film of all time.”

The writer and director talks about Luis Buñuel’s surreal combination of the mundane and the absurd, shares what he learned from Martin Scorsese’s early shorts, and selects formative favorites like If. . . . and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Jan 1, 2020 — See if you can guess what we have coming up in 2020.

Jan 1, 2019 — See if you can guess what we have coming up in 2019.

Barry Jenkins is a film director and screenwriter. He directed and cowrote the film Moonlight, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2016. In 2018, he wrote and directed a film adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale...