What a Way to Go!

Aug 9, 2010 — San Francisco filmmaker Terry Zwigoff’s first cinematic effort, the 1985 Louie Bluie, is a wry, ribald, and magical portrait of the country-blues string band player and irrepressible raconteur Howard Armstrong (a.k.a. Louie Bluie). This catchy, engaging sixty-minute documentary, a clattering...

Feb 25, 2026 — A survey of Black cinema and memories of watching movies with John Ashbery are among this month’s highlights.

Apr 9, 2018 — The retrospective of work by Lucrecia Martel at the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be the first of many around the country and abroad in the coming weeks, so we’ll take a closer look in a separate entry on...

Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.

Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Jul 9, 2001 — John Schlesinger’s classic is an exuberant satire of a society caught between its old ways and the urge to modernize.

Apr 24, 2019 — When It Rains Charles Burnett has long been recognized by historians as one of the greatest American film directors, and he’s won numerous important awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2017. Nevertheless, he is still relatively unknown beyond the world...

Mar 24, 2026 — In this true-crime epic, Martin Scorsese combines his career-long exploration of amoral gangsterism with a sobering meditation on what it means to live on American soil.

Dec 22, 2023 — An appreciation of Raúl Ruiz, a chat with Maggie Renzi and John Sayles, and a holiday lightning round.