Jan 17, 2023 — One of contemporary cinema’s most provocative filmmakers launched his career with three deeply unnerving, deliriously genre-blending portraits of Europe.

Apr 8, 2018 — Saige Walton and Nadine Boljkovac introduce the dossier “Materializing Absence” in the new issue of Screening the Past: “We start from the central premise that absence in screen media is not ‘nothing’—that absence itself is always invested with material attributes....

Feb 28, 2022 — Ulysses Jenkins is an artist of extremes, an innovator who has probed the limits of a wide range of aesthetic modes for over five decades. Though he’s best known for his video art, a medium whose conventions he has been...

Jun 6, 2017 — Combining sardonic humor with poignant characterizations, this cult comedy explores the discontents of two high-school graduates adrift in strip-mall America.

Dec 13, 2011 — Just what is it that makes Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) so different, so appealing? The cherubic hero in the neat powder blue suit, who looks like he was torn out of a yakuza pop-up book? That hauntingly cornball theme...

Sep 23, 2002 — In 1940 and 1941, David O. Selznick won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Picture. In 1942, unsurprisingly, he was depressed. His wife, Irene, persuaded him to seek help, and, less than one year later, hale and hardy, he was eager...

Dec 1, 2009 — This nonfiction masterwork by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin is a terrifying snapshot of the sudden collapse of the sixties.

Mar 30, 2010 — The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with precious few directors of his generation....

Feb 20, 2024 — I have, over time, become wary of and impatient with the word authentic, especially when it’s too casually and blithely deployed, as it often is these days, to defame or diminish someone or something based on arbitrary standards of what...

Dec 12, 2017 — “Evil is ascendant,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “The Resistance—an intrepid, multi-everything group whose leaders include a battle-tested woman warrior—has been fighting the good fight for years but is outnumbered and occasionally outmaneuvered. Yes, the latest Star...