Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Oct 5, 2016 — Rock critic Robert Christgau examines the evocative use of three early Leonard Cohen songs in Robert Altman’s brilliant revisionist western.

Nov 22, 2023 — Quite an emotional range this week, from musicals and romantic comedies to the terror of nuclear war.

Jul 7, 2023 — This week gives us a new Cinema Scope, an Ernst Lubitsch podcast, and an interview with John Woo.

Dec 29, 2022 — Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Catherine Breillat, Michael Mann, Christian Petzold, David Fincher . . .

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

Apr 22, 2021 — Monte Hellman In 1965, Monte Hellman took a cast and crew to a desert in Utah and shot two westerns back to back. With The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, Hellman introduced an existential dread and a Beckettian sense...

Dec 21, 2017 — New York. “One of the great films about childhood and life during wartime, Claude Berri’s piquant, piercing debut, The Two of Us (1967), also stands—despite its highly personal and historic milieu—as a study of a perennial generational conflict,” writes Alan...

Dec 24, 2014 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s poignant Morning for the Osone Family looks at grief over World War II from the perspective of one Japanese family. Shot immediately following the country’s surrender, when directors like Kinoshita were no longer under the thumb of wartime...

Dec 16, 2014 — The prolific and popular Keisuke Kinoshita made his fascinating first movies at a time of great difficulty and censorship, yet their spirit and brilliance shine through.