Best in Show

Whether satire or slapstick, eliciting giggles or guffaws, a vast array of farcical flicker shows await you. It's enough to make even the sourest cinephile smile.

Apr 23, 2009 — These profiles of the real-life Sada Abé and the actress who portrayed her in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses first appeared in Donald Richie’s 1987 book Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese, and can also be found...

Feb 11, 2002 — The last, best, and funniest movie Milos Forman would make in his native Czechoslovakia is a deceptively simple miniature.

Dec 18, 1989 — Billy Wilder’s comedic genius is on full display in this beloved classic starring a never-better Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis, who spends most of the film in drag.

Aug 25, 2026 — The pioneering husband-and-wife duo transformed the field of Japanese nonfiction cinema with their portraits of spectacular, edgy personalities and collectives under duress.

Apr 17, 2026 — From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth...

Jan 5, 2026 — One of France’s biggest stars took the world by storm before her reputation took a turn.

Nov 13, 2025 — The director of Rat Trap and Monologue was an uncompromising artist who helped establish the Indian state of Kerala as a hub of bold political filmmaking.

Oct 30, 2025 — Classics of the genre—including Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession and David Cronenberg’s The Fly—explore the gory extremes of corporeal experience.

Oct 24, 2025 — This French art-horror master shocked audiences with a string of sexy vampire movies often centered on complex female friendships and women-ruled fantasy worlds.