MoMA’s screening series “Long Live the Underground!” is a celebration in honor of two esteemed New York institutions. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, founded in 1961, was…
A young woman walks through a field of white flowers, suspended for a moment with neither origin nor destination, seemingly fallen to earth in Carlos…
Under the aegis of the recently formed specialty label Clockwork, Warner Bros. Pictures is finally releasing a full restoration of Ken Russell’s The Devils in…
The thematic programs in MoMA’s retrospective commemorating the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop are generally grouped around certain political (“Make Love Not War”), poetic…
Fourteen years ago, Dan Sallitt burst into the indie film scene with his transgressive, funny, and ultimately sweet, The Unspeakable Act. It wasn’t Sallitt’s first…
Ever-present on those pesky “most disturbing movies” lists, Begotten almost became a victim of its own success. The film’s demiurge, God Killing Himself, adorns the…
The United States of America is a drag queen. Drunk, dressed in her shiniest finery, and thickly rouged, the American empire according to Jack Smith…
My prewar apartment building in Queens has a mind of its own when it comes to temperature regulation. As another nor’easter batters the city, you…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
I recently had the good fortune to screen Macedonian writer-director Leon Ristov’s short film Nikola, Nikola, which had its World Premiere in June at the…
Leonardo Pirondi’s debut feature Tropicais Fractais isn’t your conventional sci-fi epic. There is a spaceship, a futuristic bio-dome-like built environment, AI-powered supercomputers, and the impending…
“Intergenerational trauma” is a phrase that comes up often as a therapeutic buzzword, but less often is it talked about in systemic terms. When Colette…
There is a striking early scene with an unknown woman that cuts deep into the sensory motif embedded in the title of May el-Toukhy’s latest…
In 2025, among the best films of the year, at least according to this very outlet, was Lav Diaz’s Magellan. That work concluded along the…
Few filmmakers have confronted the fractures of modern America with such formal rigor and moral devotion as Barbara Kopple. For several decades, the legendary documentarian…
Looking back to the heyday of the New Queer Cinema movement that ruled the ’90s (the term itself was coined by film critic and scholar…
Because of its ability to replicate life, the cinema has long been a preferred medium for exploring the meaning of death. People die in films…
Identical twin sisters — so closely connected that they speak in unison, dream the same dreams, and furiously love the same man — dig a…
Film sets tend to be loud, full of people bustling around each other, in one breath bemoaning the lack of budget, materials, and film stock,…
Since I first reviewed Chronovisor in my Rotterdam coverage this past February, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s feature debut has become a miniature sensation. Not…
Before beginning production on Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock invited screenwriter Arthur Laurents to dinner with his wife Alma. The film’s star, Farley Granger, with whom…