Best of the Best

Mar 9, 1992 — The ads for Boyz N the Hood, the debut of a 23-year old writer-director named John Singleton, treated the film as if it took place in another galaxy—a mysterious fiefdom far, far away. And so it does, set in a...

Jan 28, 1991 — The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in...

Jan 7, 1991 — Roman Polanski’s riposte to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was greeted as a brilliant, grisly potboiler that gave the thirty-two-year-old Polish filmmaker commercial entry to the West.

Apr 23, 1990 — Paying little attention to civilized rules of cinema, and with a bit more than one million dollars, Steven Soderbergh expresses all his hidden anxieties in this indie classic.

Jan 11, 1989 — Thursday, March 2, 1944—the United States is in its third year of war with the Axis powers. More than 12 million Americans are fighting on various fronts; the German armies are being repulsed at Anzio and the newspapers have large...

Apr 4, 1988 — Back in 1968 when The Producers made its debut, writer-director Mel Brooks was better known within the entertainment industry than by the public at large. His writing for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and the Get Smart television series,...

Jun 23, 2026 — “Ozone Hole over Baltimore?” queries a panicky 1992 headline in the Baltimore Sun. Sure, as the article clarifies, the Maryland metropolis, eternal home base of trash icon John Waters, is no more vulnerable to ozone depletion than any other city...

May 19, 2026 — “Last night, I was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” proclaimed Maxim Gorky, writing about an 1896 projection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. “Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and...

Nov 21, 2023 — What stuck with me most after watching La cérémonie (1995) for the first time was the chewing gum.It’s not the scene most often cited in discussions of this late-career classic from French thriller master Claude Chabrol. Don’t get me wrong:...

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...