A battle between cinema and television has raged since the earliest monochrome broadcasts became popular in American homes during the 1950s. When the cathode ray tube first flickered images on small s...

Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is a love story, but the rarest kind of love story. Though filmed in black-and-white, it’s anything but. Baumbach’s film doesn’t feature a protagonist who ...

Insurance salesman Walter Neff’s mind isn’t so much on renewing his client’s automobile policy as landing the man’s blonde bombshell wife, Phyllis. She first appears to Walter at the top of the stairc...

Disturbing yet bitterly funny, Sunset Blvd. stands as perhaps the greatest of all films about Hollywood. Some might call it a portrait of silent film stars unable to keep their careers going once talk...

An embroidered sign on the wall of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin reads, “Tell the Truth.” The paper’s managing editor, the moral and idealistic journalist Jacob Boot, hung it there &#...

“Look upon me! I’ll show you the life of the mind!” proclaims John Goodman’s character in Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterful hermetic comedy from 1991 about a playwright and would-be s...

David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. defies all waking, verbalized logic. Its audience must commit themselves to being dream detectives, a cinematic métier in which we are required to decipher cryptic d...

Star Wars belongs on a shortlist of important films that have been so saturated into our minds, so ingrained and present in our everyday culture, that watching the film now is almost an empty experien...

The perfect murder. So many cinematic killers have tried and failed to carry out a flawless crime. Watching them try usually proves to be an endurance test in suspense because their schemes seldom go ...