Up Against It

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...

Nov 17, 2020 — This week sees the release of Melissa Maerz’s new book, Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Aug 13, 2026 — In Kidlat Tahimik’s playful and unpredictable film, a Philippine village is tasked with manufacturing thousands of figurines for the Olympic Games, upending the lives and customs of the local population.

May 22, 2026 — This week brings a look back at Cronenberg’s Crash and conversations with Boots Riley and Wallace Shawn.

May 30, 2024 — The season brings new biographies of Ingmar Bergman and Elaine May, a novel by Miranda July, plus interviews, excerpts, and podcasts

Jan 31, 2022 — What have the critics been saying about this year’s winners?

May 6, 2021 — Fame, as the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once observed, is reductive. “Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished,” he wrote in 2666, an epic novel published after his death.What Bolaño identified as the...