The Little Gangster

Aug 3, 2020 — The British director of sprightly musicals, wrenching family dramas, and gripping political thrillers was seventy-six.

Jan 11, 2017 — A revelatory restoration of Lewis Milestone’s underappreciated newsroom comedy accentuates the film’s punchy rhythms and breakneck banter.

Aug 24, 2010 — T he Docks of New York is one of those orphaned silents, released in 1928, the very end of the era. Apparently, it was previewed the same week as Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool, his first “all-talking” picture, the follow-up...

May 26, 2026 — Top prizes go to films by Cristian Mungiu, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Valeska Grisebach, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Los Javis.

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Jun 21, 2022 — By centering an empowered Black hero, Gordon Parks reimagined the detective genre and exposed its racial politics.

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

Dec 4, 2017 — The week begins with good news: Wes Anderson’s stop motion animated film Isle of Dogs will open the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival (February 15 through 25). As the Berlinale reminds us, this is “the story of Atari Kobayashi, twelve-year-old...

Jul 10, 2017 — “While many of my more memorable screenings involved companions and cohorts—seeing Barbarella on a second date with the woman I’d eventually marry; catching a revival of Andrei Rublev with a friend as an elderly Russian lady noisily ate stinky borscht...

Jun 22, 2017 — The new issue of Senses of Cinema opens with a whopping dossier on Budd Boetticher (1916–2001). In his introduction, Dean Brandum notes that “in 1960, at the very moment he seemed destined for A-list status, he walked away from Hollywood,...