The Call

Dec 17, 2021 — A Nicole Brenez dossier and writing on Melvin Van Peebles and Nicolas Cage are among this week’s highlights.

Dec 14, 2021 — Handsome volumes on Wes Anderson and David Fincher, a biography of Greta Garbo, and a memoir from Mel Brooks are among this month’s highlights.

Oct 13, 2021 — When I was growing up in the 1970s, the Black Panther Party’s trademark Afros and black leather jackets were a familiar sight. But it wasn’t until I began studying the Black Panthers in my late teens that I became familiar with...

Aug 3, 2021 — With two short films and his acclaimed debut feature, No Data Plan, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Filipino American filmmaker discusses his vision of the immigrant experience.

Jun 17, 2021 — On our minds this week: Lizzie Borden, Jenni Olson, Dorothy Arzner, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Rivette, and female detectives on television.

Apr 19, 2021 — What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics....

Mar 25, 2021 — In With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, an autobiography cowritten by legendary creative and life partners Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Dee tells the story of working as a screenwriter on 1968’s Uptight. It’s a brief account, about...

Jan 25, 2021 — First Person The release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—the first film of the Star Wars anthology series, and a major occasion for many Star Wars fans—on December 16, 2016, was preceded by a much larger event on November...

Jun 30, 2020 — Come and See (1985) is one of those films whose authority is established from its opening moments. Out in the open air, an elderly peasant dressed in a soft-peaked beret is volleying a mixture of threats and imprecations into some...

Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...