Life Is Beautiful

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

Dec 13, 2024 — The week’s offered fine writing on Elaine May, Robert Siodmak and Ella Raines, and Christopher Nolan’s turning-point movie.

Nov 14, 2024 — BAM revisits the culture wars in a series that includes films by Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes, and David Cronenberg.

Nov 5, 2024 — As a composer, arranger, producer, and perhaps above all, connector, Jones was one of the most vital artists of the past seventy years.

Oct 18, 2024 — Names in the news this week: Bette Gordon, Robert Frank, Don Hertzfeldt, Alfonso Cuarón, Cate Blanchett, and Quentin Tarantino.

Oct 16, 2024 — This year’s special anniversary edition will open with Malcolm Washington’s August Wilson adaptation, The Piano Lesson.

Sep 20, 2024 — With their virtuosic celebrations of death, giallo films reflect the air of paranoia and fear that haunted Italian society in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when the country was undergoing dramatic, violent changes.

Sep 17, 2024 — A vision of late-1970s London that foreshadows the political volatility of the Margaret Thatcher era, this gangster saga stars an unforgettably tempestuous Bob Hoskins as a little Englander with big dreams.

Aug 28, 2024 — United by a meditative approach that captures the spiritual bounty of the natural landscape and the tolls of physical labor, this Mexican director’s films challenge stereotypical depictions of his country’s rural communities.

Aug 20, 2024 — In the late 1980s, filmmakers Gregorio Rocha and Sarah Minter set out to capture the rebellious subculture of youth in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a slumlike suburb synonymous with the worst failures of urban expansion in Mexico.