On Film

Essays

1358 Results
Paper Moon: Partners in Crime

In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.

By Mark Harris

The Shape of Water: A Touch of the Unknown

Combining sci-fi magic and a distinctly human sense of intimacy, Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning film reimagines an oppressive era in American history through a tale of romantic fate.

By Carlos Aguilar

Funny Girl: A Feeling Deep in Your Soul

William Wyler’s adaptation of the Broadway musical celebrates the indomitability of vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, embodied by Barbra Streisand in an incandescent and remarkably vulnerable performance.

By Michael Koresky

Scarface: Gangster Style

Filled with expressionistic shadows and pungent details of life in the criminal underworld, this seminal tale of money and violence was among director Howard Hawks’s favorite of his own films.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Gummo: It Feels Like Home

In his entrancingly deviant directorial debut, Harmony Korine captures life in an impoverished, tragedy-stricken small town in all its beautiful fragility.

By Carlos Aguilar

Demon Pond: Here Comes the Flood

This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.

By Michael Atkinson

The Seventh Victim: The Inner Darkness

Though it received dismissive reviews upon its release, this chillingly nihilistic horror film has since influenced such masters as Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Rivette with its low-budget evocation of anxiety and indeterminacy.

By Lucy Sante

I Walked with a Zombie: Better Doctors

An otherworldly exploration of the realm between life and death, this horror masterpiece transcends its genre with its poetic, often unsettling use of fragmentation and discontinuity.

By Chris Fujiwara

Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy: No Fucks Given

Emerging out of the mass death, cultural ferment, and semiotic tumult of the 1990s, this trio of deliriously profane films glares at American youth culture and gives zero shits if it looks back.

By Nathan Lee

Happiness: Love & Mercy

A sceenwriter, novelist, and longtime friend of director Todd Solondz recalls the admiration he felt upon first seeing this audacious ensemble drama, which offers an unflinching, compassionate look at the pain and abjection of being human.

By Bruce Wagner

The Long Good Friday: Corporate Governance

A vision of late-1970s London that foreshadows the political volatility of the Margaret Thatcher era, this gangster saga stars an unforgettably tempestuous Bob Hoskins as a little Englander with big dreams.

By Ryan Gilbey

All of Us Strangers: Phantom Attachments

Andrew Haigh explores loss and queer loneliness in this exquisite, twilit tangle of lives and loves separated by space, time, and personal defenses.

By Guy Lodge

Mother: Look, Ma, No Therapist!

Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds are at their comedic best in this tale of parent-child bonding filled with Oedipal humor and emotional insight.

By Carrie Rickey

Real Life: A Young, Honest Guy Like Himself

A brilliant satire, inspired by a 1973 PBS documentary series that gave rise to the reality-television genre, Albert Brooks’s first feature film examines the ethical dilemmas of combining cheap entertainment and sociological experiment.

By A. S. Hamrah

Not a Pretty Picture: An Act of Reckoning

In her formally daring debut feature, Martha Coolidge stages a confrontation with the subject of date rape that questions the kind of “closure” required in conventional storytelling.

By Molly Haskell

Two Films by Kira Muratova: Restless Moments

In films that elude categorization, the Ukrainian director developed a boldly experimental aesthetic that evokes her mercurial inner dialogue and the leaps and stutters of her imagination.

By Jessica Kiang

Risky Business: Coming of Age in Reagan’s America

Unlike the string of early-1980s sex comedies that it superficially resembles, Paul Brickman’s debut feature fuses fierce social satire and dark, dreamy eroticism with unexpectedly rich and ambiguous results.

By Dave Kehr

Farewell My Concubine: All the World’s a Stage

Chen Kaige’s sweeping epic chronicles the history of twentieth-century China through the story of two childhood friends, contrasting the unchanging traditions of their Beijing-opera milieu with the nation’s swift and turbulent transformation.

By Pauline Chen

Black God, White Devil: Feeding on Hunger

Glauber Rocha’s ambitious breakthrough film manifested the project of Cinema Novo, a new wave that sought to overcome the influence of Brazil’s colonial origins and find images and sounds that could reconceive the nation.

By Fábio Andrade

Perfect Days: Where the Light Comes Through

In one of the most patient films he has ever made, Wim Wenders captures how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.

By Bilge Ebiri

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: Renegade’s Requiem

Self-destruction is not only an aesthetic but its own subject matter in Sam Peckinpah’s deeply elegiac western, a towering masterpiece that examines American power and greed.

By Steve Erickson

The Underground Railroad: The Wound and the Remedy

Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

By Angelica Jade Bastién

Victims of Sin: Dancing in the Dark

A masterpiece from the golden age of Mexican cinema, Emilio Fernández’s film is a prime example of the cabaretera film, an offshoot of the popular “prostitute melodrama” genre.

By Jacqueline Avila

Bound: Be Gay, Do Crime

In this stylish erotic noir, Lilly and Lana Wachowski delight in destabilizing our genre and gender expectations, laying the foundation for the trans sensibility that runs through all their work.

By McKenzie Wark