The Fight

Dec 11, 2024 — Sean Baker’s eighth feature has been picking up awards and nominations and landing on several best-of-2024 lists.

Sep 28, 2022 — Uday Shankar’s fantastical dance epic embodies a progressive, postcolonial Indian aesthetic that is decades ahead of its time.

Apr 27, 2022 — In his uncompromising chronicles of modern Japanese society, the celebrated filmmaker shows a deep understanding of both larger-than-life individuals and collectives of ordinary citizens.

Mar 1, 2022 — The first film I saw at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival opens on the image of a freshly dug grave. Shovelfuls of earth fall into the open pit as two doctors stand above it, lamenting the loss of yet...

Jun 30, 2021 — A Twitter thread gone viral becomes a stylistically innovative comedy about race and extremely online culture.

Feb 9, 2021 — What does parallax mean? It is a term that English speakers are perpetually learning and always forgetting. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses: “Parallax. I never exactly understood . . . Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” In the technical sense, the word...

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Dec 4, 2019 — Songbook Midway through Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), the plot pivots on a song. “You’ve got some weird shit in here,” says Joanne (Kierston Wareing,), riffling through the CDs in her new boyfriend’s car. It’s the morning after a boozy...

Sep 13, 2019 — Lucrecia Martel, Annette Michelson, Satyajit Ray, and Joanna Hogg feature in this week’s round.