The roar of the engines, the smell of burning rubber on pavement, and the adrenaline-rush exhilaration of pedal-to-the-metal speed: the kinetic thrill of cool cars in motion is front and center in these two action classics guaranteed to get your motor running. Steve McQueen confirmed his status a...
Two quietly revelatory, elegantly unassuming works weave tales of unexpected human connection in which art, architecture, and environment serve as characters unto themselves. In Jem Cohen’s sublime MUSEUM HOURS, it’s the grand halls and artistic masterworks of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum th...
Two groundbreaking queer period dramas explore forbidden desire and the struggle to live as one’s true self amid the repression of early-twentieth-century British society. Adapted by Julian Mitchell from his play of the same name, Marek Kanievska’s ANOTHER COUNTRY stars Rupert Everett as an openl...
In 1921, Charlie Chaplin’s immortal Little Tramp teamed up with Jackie Coogan’s streetwise ragamuffin in THE KID, and one of the all-time great screen matchups was born. Nearly seventy years later, writer-director-actor Charles Lane paid homage to Chaplin’s classic in the nearly silent SIDEWALK S...
Kathleen Collins’s independent landmark LOSING GROUND is a luminous, brilliantly perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads and a woman’s emotional awakening. One of the first films to explore black female desire with nuance and philosophical complexity, it contains a key allusion to actre...
Grab some tissues and get ready to celebrate Mother’s Day with two sterling adaptations of Olive Higgins Prouty’s classic, tear-wringing tale of maternal sacrifice. Filmed first in 1925 by producer Samuel Goldwyn and director Henry King from a script by Frances Marion, the original STELLA DALLAS,...
Two idiosyncratic auteurs revisit the worlds of their childhood in these elegiac explorations of memory and place. In his mesmerizing found-footage memoir OF TIME AND THE CITY, British rhapsodist Terence Davies reflects on growing up in the working-class Liverpool of the 1950s and ’60s, his remin...
Jean Renoir and Akira Kurosawa, two of cinema’s greatest directors, transform Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play “The Lower Depths” in their own ways for their own times. Renoir, working alongside the Popular Front in France while Hitler rose in Germany, took license with the dark nature of G...
Samuel Fuller and Orson Welles bring a mischievous sleight of hand to these slippery accounts of some of history’s most notorious scammers, cheats, and cons. Based on a stranger-than-fiction true story, Fuller’s offbeat western-noir gem THE BARON OF ARIZONA stars Vincent Price at his unctuous bes...
With his 1948 HAMLET, director-star Laurence Olivier created what remains the definitive screen version of the Bard’s venerable drama, a vividly cinematic, psychologically charged interpretation that garnered Oscars for both best picture and best actor. Less likely to win any awards is the hilari...
Jacques Demy’s candy-colored, enchantingly romantic musical THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG may not seem like an obvious pairing with a fast-and-furious swordplay spectacular filled with glinting blades and bloody vengeance. Nevertheless, LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY’s director, John Woo, counts the swoon...
The fascinating and elusive matinee idol turned art-house actor Dirk Bogarde gives complex and morally ambiguous performances in both of these controversial, ahead-of-their-time dramas.
Two career criminals attempt to go straight, only to get sucked back into the underworld in Seijun Suzuki’s delirious pop-art spin on the yakuza genre and John Mackenzie’s gripping gangster film starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.
No New York: Grifters and drifters make their way through the grime of early-eighties downtown bohemia.
Child actor John Howard Davies headlines two Brit-lit adaptations about the fickle fortunes of boyhood.
Environmental threats hang over these two atmospheric mood pieces. Antonioni’s first color film evokes the creeping malaise that comes with industrialization, while the apocalypse itself looms nigh in Peter Weir’s beguiling mystery.
The American author Patricia Highsmith’s dark, violent writing provides the source material for these two edgy European thrillers.
These ultracool, stylish studies of gambling addiction and life on the fringes are a pair of aces.
Kon Ichikawa delivers a black comedy about sexual dysfunction and a gender-bending revenge thriller.
Watch David Lean’s classic adaptation after Terence Davies’s moving THE LONG DAY CLOSES—which references Charles Dickens’s novel.
Inspectors Maigret and Murakami are on the case in Paris and Tokyo in these detective stories inspired by Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.
Two cult-classic oaters: one tense and tortured, the other full of unsolved enigmas.
Bloodthirsty, brain-sucking terror comes from within in these chilling tales, produced by horror-impresario brothers Alex and Robert Gordon and originally released as a double bill in 1958.
Two early films from the always provocative Lars von Trier. One immerses us in a post-apocalyptic future, the other, a strangely futuristic past.
