Looking Back
Jul 15th, 2020
On May 8, 1970, the AFL-CIO mobilized some two hundred New York City construction workers and sicc’ed them on about a thousand high school and...
Looking Back
Jul 1st, 2020
“What do you think you are doing?” yells the village elder, to the boys he cannot see. “Playing a game? Who are you playing with?” Once...
Looking Back
Jun 24th, 2020
When a filmmaker tells you what influenced them, believe it. Back in 2017, when Jordan Peele was making the rounds promoting his feature directorial...
Looking Back
Jun 17th, 2020
It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong, and I’m 6’4”, so I admit that I’m wrong a lot. And I’m going to do it again, right now. A...
Looking Back
Jun 10th, 2020
Chantal Akerman was 25 years old when her technically groundbreaking, emotionally devastating, and alternately revered and reviled Jeanne Dielman,...
Looking Back
Jun 3rd, 2020
The first cut comes a few minutes into the second scene of Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, and it happens so quickly that if you glance away for a...
Looking Back
May 27th, 2020
When the semi-annual conversation on female buddy movies resurfaces, there are usual suspects. Thelma and Louise. B.A.P.S. Romy and Michelle’s...
Looking Back
May 20th, 2020
John Frankenheimer’s 1966 thriller Seconds is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their Saul Bass centennial,and his...
Looking Back
May 13th, 2020
The Harlem-set blaxploitation movies of the 1970s – films like Super Fly, Black Caesar, and Hell Up in Harlem – share a specific verbal...
Looking Back
May 6th, 2020
Early in Claire’s Knee, Eric Rohmer’s 1970 comedy/drama, our protagonist Jérôme engages in an idle, maybe-hypothetical-maybe-not with his old...
Looking Back
Apr 29th, 2020
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” –...
Looking Back
Apr 22nd, 2020
“A lightweight story.” That was what Hitchcock called his 1955 romantic thriller: “It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.” In his...
Looking Back
Apr 15th, 2020
“Life, every now and then, behaves as if it had seen too many bad movies.” So notes Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) in the opening voice-over of...
Looking Back
Apr 8th, 2020
“I’m not a field agent,” he insists. “I just read books.” And while that might be true, he’s going to have to learn to be a field agent,...
Looking Back
Apr 1st, 2020
I selected Hud as the inaugural entry for “Classics Corner,” a new weekly feature spotlighting a pre-1980 film newly available on disc or...