On May 30, the Metropolitan Opera’s 2025–26 Live in HD season comes to a close with a live transmission of American composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, a magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Fashioned as a r more »
Every year hundreds of women flock to temporary harvesting jobs in the rice paddies of Northern Italy, a perfect setting for working-class drama and romance. Doris Dowling is soaking in it - on the lam from the law, torn between a crook boyfriend and an upright soldier, trying to get on with her fellow workers. Giuseppe De Santi more »
Follows a group of shoplifters who take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven. more »
After breaking the mysterious "One Wish Willow" to win his crush's heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price. more »
In the tense 72 hours before D-Day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg face an impossible choice--launch the most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing the war altogether. more »
A talented piano tuner's meticulous skills for tuning pianos lead him to discover an unexpected aptitude for cracking safes, turning his life upside down. more »
John Woo was just another struggling Hong Kong filmmaker before this story of brotherhood, sacrifice, and many, many round of 9mm ammunition rebooted his career. Ti Lung and the uber-charismatic Chow Yun-fat star as down-and-out gangsters dragged back into the life. Woo himself plays a small role as well as choreographing the pi more »
Rick, a washed-up wedding singer, and Danny, a fading boy band star, bond over music and a late-night jam session. When Danny turns Rick's song into a hit, Rick sets out to reclaim the recognition he believes he deserves. more »
Marcello Mastroianni stands in for director Federico Fellini as a celebrated cinema auteur besieged by the demands of his life and career and blocked over the creation of his next film (which you are currently watching). But no capsule logline captures the mindmeld effect of Fellini's mix of reality, memory, dreams, and fantasy, more »
Amy Heckerling transposes Jane Austen's Emma to Southern California mall culture with Alicia Silverstone as the contemporary stand-in for Austen's title busybody, matchmaking and Pygmalioning it up even as her own life gets a bit random. Even laden with 30-year speech and standards, the director's script sparkles. A perfect film more »
If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? more »
Is Close-Up a documentary? An Iranian man who pretended to be a famous Iranian director appears as himself, as does the family he hoaxed and the journalist who broke the story. Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami secured permission to film the man's trial, and asks questions of the defendant on camera during the proceedings. Issues of pe more »
Complications arise when Coley, the new girl in town, falls for Sonya, a teen who has a boyfriend. more »
Grappling with his past after a life of crime and murder, Robin Hood finds himself gravely injured after a battle he thought would be his last. In the hands of a mysterious woman, he is offered a chance at salvation. more »
Thank god for Val Kilmer. Even Kurt Russell and his vigorous mustache can't quite save this epic Western saga from its self-seriousness and open-range sprawl. But Kilmer's Doc Holiday - a consumptive dandy and cardsharp quick with a pistol and a withering quip - makes every scene he's in a hoot and sticking around well worth it. more »
Jean-Claude Dourot’s handsome young carpenter has everything going for him: an adoring wife he loves, two cute kids, good pals, a great life. Why wouldn’t an affair with fetching clerk Marie-France Boyer make things even better? Agnès Varda packages her savage satire of male privilege in one of the most gorgeous films the Nouvel more »
It’s almost impossible to qualify the impact when David Lynch’s Twin Peaks debuted on ABC in 1990, especially when watching the first Lynch-overseen season again now. It’s tame compared to prestige TV du jour, and far soapier than you may recall, but its mutant DNA is still evident as Kyle MacLachlan’s buoyant FBI agent investig more »
The documentary that launched a thousand Halloween costumes and about half of what came to be known as reality TV. The Maysles brothers turned their camera on Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little Edie,” two eccentric blueblood matrons living together in a rotting, raccoon-infested mansion in East Hampton. As nutty as the more »
It’s easy to forget that James Bond’s big breakout mostly lacked gadgets and boffo action sequences and sky-high body counts. All it really had going for it was a Scottish ex-bodybuilder already losing his hair. Sean Connery just is Bond, his smolder and low-key physical grace moving him through the plot, the scraps, and the cli more »
Very few films bear genuine punk cred, but Alex Cox’s debut does. Emilio Estevez’s aimless lunk drifts away from the dumbass SoCal hardcore scene and into a crew of legal car thieves, who provide him a few bucks, something like direction, even a philosophy, the latter courtesy dirtbag bodhisattva Harry Dean Stanton. Vicious, cyn more »
Alfred Hitchcock didn’t invent the internet, but it’s fascinating to watch James Stewart’s laid-up photographer sit on his ass and gawk at other people’s lives through a proliferation of open windows. It’s just one of the many ways the maestro’s voyeuristic thriller continues to give and surprise year after year, and continues t more »
A double bill from Kiyoshi Kurosawa that highlights his skills at onscreen unease. Serpent’s Path, from 1998, follows a minor gangster’s blackly comic crusade of revenge for the death of his daughter as the body count mounts. The recent 45-minute Chime chills à la his classics Pulse or Cure as a cooking-school instructor finds more »
After the Trojan War, Odysseus faces a dangerous voyage back to Ithaca, meeting creatures like the Cyclops Polyphemus, Sirens, and Circe along the way. more »
Four bros from the big city light out for the sticks to chill in a country house after one of them suffers a bad breakup. They bribe and boss the local men, attempt to despoil the local girls, and discover that women of their own class have thoughts and feelings, too. Recently restored, Satyajit Ray’s Rohmer-like gem returns fro more »
Cocaine? In Twin Peaks? The plot thickens. Also, the series doesn’t get enough credit for incredibly abrasive characters in prime time, like Laura Palmer’s sleazy uncle (David Patrick Kelly) and aggro FBI man Albert Rosenfield (Mel Ferrer). The whole sawmill thing always seemed like a weird detour, but the Black Lodge appears! more »
George Lucas famously raided Akira Kurosawa’s lesser classic for Star Wars: the squabbling mismatched comic relief as main characters, the fugitive princess, the wily general in disguise, even the wipes. Makes sense since Kurosawa, coming off a string of somber films, made Hidden Fortress as a stab at a big box-office action-adv more »
The outsized scale of Hollywood tended to stifle John Woo’s action chops, but he had excellent hole cards here in a loony premise and two of the English-speaking world’s preeminent scenery chewers in the lead roles. John Travolta’s obsessed FBI agent and Nicolas Cage’s bonkers master criminal switch faces! They play characters p more »
John Dall plays a nice-guy deadeye who just really loves guns. Peggy Cummins plays a not-so-nice trick shooter in a traveling carnival. When the sparks fly between them, so does the lead as their honeymoon turns into a crime spree. The two leads and director Joseph H. Lewis play over their heads, turning the ridiculous pulp prem more »
The Wachowski sisters’ adaptation of the Japanese cult-classic cartoon became the first film shot entirely with green-screen technology, for better or worse. Emile Hirsch plays the title boy driver, battling the forces of corporate greed as he battles for first place amid a dizzying abundance of candyapple colors and endless yaw more »
There’s a new funder of scientific research in 1950s America who has access to super-advanced technology and a bulging forehead beneath his oddball hairline. Thus begins this kitschy drive-in classic, which putters along in low gear for several reels before the action moves off-world, and the film shifts into a riotous overdrive more »
John Cassavetes’ de facto swan song is a bit of a mess, but so are its characters. His louche playboy author is so pickled in booze and stray nubiles that he hardly knows how to respond when his estranged young son shows up or his emotionally fragile sister (Cassavetes’ wife/muse Gena Rowlands) materializes with two taxis full o more »
John Woo’s films lost something when he moved to Hollywood and could afford to make tumbling sports cars a leitmotif. The director’s two-fisted kinetic genius ricochets around cramped sets in this Hong Kong crime masterpiece, creating an explosive energy that’s still rarely equalled in today’s action cinema. Chow Yun-fat forms more »
Many of Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries peer at an institution to unpack multiple stories about what they are and how they function. This one is a dance. Leaving aside the win/lose struggles baked into boxing, Wiseman focuses his camera on the manifold patrons of a workaday gym in Texas and watches them move, shadows them thro more »
The second greatest reggae film ever (after The Harder They Come) casts drummer Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace as a hustling musician trying to make the scene and make a little cash only to be thwarted by crooked club owners. Will he come out on top? Rockers lacks THTC’s outlaw urgency but makes up for it with good vibes and killer more »
A plane crash in then-remote Tibet lands Ronald Colman and a small party of Westerners in a hidden valley amid the frozen peaks, a balmy sanctuary where no one grows old and everyone lives in peace and plenty. These days, that premise would be a platform for an eventual good vs. evil battle, but Frank Capra’s epochal film is mor more »
The late Béla Tarr’s swan song strips his previous work down to its most elemental state. As captured in the director’s trademark long takes, an old man and his adult daughter live on almost nothing. Their beleaguered cart horse refuses to work. Their well dries up. How can they continue? How can anyone? An unaccountably moving more »
Twin Peaks was enough of a conventional TV show that it used the “look-alike cousin” trope to bring Sheryl “Laura Palmer” Lee back as a series regular. Also, sometimes the clues and plot turns here seem like a writer threw them in when Lynch was out of town. As ominous as BOB is, Leo (Eric Da Re) kinda sucks as a villain. more »
If you haven’t seen this venerable Disney animated film in a while, it may surprise you to be reminded that the villainous, fur-loving Cruella de Vil is an old friend of one of the humans who own the titular canines! A true frenemy! Hand-drawn England is a bit more drab than some other classic-era settings, but once the talking- more »
Released near the height of the Vietnam War, Franklin Schaffner’s epic portrait poses the title general as both an anachronistic knight-errant and a brutal sociopath. The script spends as much time on the political maneuvering between generals as the battlefield kind, but it all pales beside George C. Scott’s magisterial perform more »
John Woo’s final first-phase Hong Kong blockbuster pushed the limits of what he could do with action before he left for Hollywood, with ballistic set pieces that outdid everything he’d done before. The teahouse! The warehouse! The climactic hospital blowout! Hard Boiled can’t top The Killer’s story beats and drippy heart, but Ch more »
Don’t know why this Orson Welles film isn’t held up alongside the likes of Touch of Evil at least. Maybe because, like Welles’ feckless Irish accent here, it’s kind of A Lot. The director’s scuffling sailor falls in with a rich lawyer (Everett Sloane) and his bombshell young wife (Rita Hayworth), launching a seafaring noir and more »
The literal missing link between Le Samouraï and Drive. Ryan O’Neal is the frosty pro getaway driver who seems to have no life except for brooding and accelerating. Bruce Dern is the detective who aches to bust him. Isabelle Adjani is the cool customer who drifts into it all. Writer/director Walter Hill’s script devel more »
Lewis Carroll’s twee surrealist classic takes on a twisted new shape courtesy of visionary Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. In this stop-motion cult fave, Alice is a real girl and the White Rabbit is a moth-nibbled taxidermied corpse whom she alternately trails and flees. The fall to Neverland becomes a dusty museum trundle, Never more »
One of the more fascinating chapters in the annals of How Did This Get Made? Robert Altman plays it straight with his musical take on the comics’ nautical strongman, which is not to say it comes out straight, exactly. Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall preside over an insanely detailed village set and a cast of character-actor ecc more »
Sirk with teeth. John M. Stahl’s melodrama tumbles into Technicolor noir as Gene Tierney’s sociopathic rich girl starts eliminating rivals for new husband Cornel Wilde’s affections. The disconnect between Tierney’s glittering surface and the lengths she’s willing to go make for a delicious thrill throughout. A fantastic studio-s more »
The fact that wholesome-seeming Laura Palmer turns out to be a drug-using sex worker was a wild leap for 1990. One of the underrated pleasures of the series is watching Sherilyn Fenn work the manager of her character’s father’s department store. The wild plot threads start to converge as the season nears an end, but who’s expec more »
