A Better Life

Jan 25, 2024 — Best known for In the Heat of the Night and Moonstruck, Jewison also directed spectacular musicals, heist thrillers, and courtroom dramas.

Dec 14, 2021 — In 1968, soon after he graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Mani Kaul made an arresting short titled Forms and Designs. It observes artisans at work across the country, some swimming alone against the tide of mass...

Jul 23, 2021 — Deep Dives In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own...

Jun 30, 2020 — A nonverbal man sits on a bench on a village street. With his hands, he tells the story of his village. His hands say that all of the villagers were herded together into a barn. His hands say that the...

May 11, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of four features and several shorts, Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf has mined the histories hidden in archives, stitching together a rich and complicated view of twentieth-century America. He’s drawn to subjects that are misunderstood...

May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...

Apr 16, 2019 — Most proper New Waves of the 1960s came equipped with a rough balance of assimilable superstars and genuine radicals, and for the Czechoslovaks, the guerrilla flank was led by Jan Němec. Jiří Menzel was adored globally for his wry humor,...

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Dec 14, 2017 — Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama is a sixty-two film series now running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York through January 7. “Sam Fuller famously defined cinema as ‘emotion,’ and just about every variety of it may be...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Noah Baumbach has always been a writer-director of no formal distinction, but he's possessed with a keen eye and ear for the intricacies of pettiness, humiliation, and schadenfreude,” begins Steve Macfarlane at Slant. “His new film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New...