Look Back

Jul 20, 2018 — American audiences weren’t ready for Barbara Loden’s Wanda when it premiered in 1970. A stark portrait of a working-class woman (played with raw conviction by Loden herself) who breaks free of a miserable marriage, only to find herself on the...

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

Jul 10, 2018 — The martial-arts film was never the same after King Hu got his hands on it, reinventing the genre with subtle editing and dazzling choreography.

Jul 4, 2018 — In his big-screen breakthrough, Sam Shepard delivers tenderness, ferocity, and the quiet expressiveness of a silent film star.

Jul 2, 2018 — Josef von Sternberg may have been one of cinema’s original micromanagers, but his films are testaments to longstanding collaborations with brilliant artists and technicians.

Jun 28, 2018 — The new restoration of Olivier Assayas’s long-unavailable breakthrough film, Cold Water, continues its tour across the country this week.

Jun 26, 2018 — John Waters’ favorite among his early works is both an assault on political correctness and a no-holds-barred expression of gay militancy.

Jun 19, 2018 — It keeps happening. At the time of this writing, students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are mourning the deaths of fourteen of their classmates and three faculty members, all of whom a nineteen-year-old is accused of...

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

Jun 11, 2018 — New on the shelves this season are volumes on David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Ernst Lubitsch.