The White Seal

Mar 8, 2021 — “I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant...

Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.

Mar 16, 2010 — More than a decade after his death in 1997, the moment is right for the rediscovery of the work of Marco Ferreri. “I think he’s modern. More than modern, in fact,” frequent collaborator Marcello Mastroianni once remarked, encapsulating how far...

Feb 20, 2024 — Dense with conflicting ideas, the hybrid film focuses on the 2021 return of centuries-old artifacts to Africa.

Sep 24, 2015 — Bruce Beresford critiques the British colonialist era in this precise, layered adaptation of a 1939 novel by Joyce Cary.

Oct 14, 2014 — What happens offscreen is as important as what’s on- in John Ford’s subtle, elegiac take on the Wyatt Earp–Doc Holliday story.

Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.

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...

Oct 29, 2014 — George Sluizer’s singularly unsettling work of psychological terror is a model of lucid craftsmanship.

Jan 7, 2022 — Travel this weekend with Stanley Kubrick, David Bowie, Sarah Maldoror, Lana Wachowski, and Tsai Ming-liang.