All the Way Home

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Apr 14, 2008 — Allen Baron’s stark, moody Blast of Silence (1961) is a movie of many strange distinctions. It’s among the last of the true film noirs, those fatalistic black-and-white urban crime dramas that darkened the American screen so gloriously in the years...

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...

Aug 25, 2026 — In her second film, Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple captures the anguish and perils of disunity in the labor movement and the corrosion of union power during the Reagan era.

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Nov 4, 2015 — Linklater circa 1990 In 1985, six years before the release of Slacker, Richard Linklater's iconic portrait of a generation, the Texan filmmaker founded the Austin Film Society. The group began as a small band of cinephiles eager to see classic,...

Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.

Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.

May 21, 2007 — Carol Reed’s masterpiece dives deep into the life and mind of screenwriter Graham Greene, one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelist.