Drumroll, please: critics Bilge Ebiri and Amy Taubin join for a real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics ...

This article appeared in the November 26, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

(Darren Aronofsky, U.S., 2010)Early in Black Swan, artistic director Thomas Leroy concludes his personal synopsis of Swan Lake with the declaration that only in death does its troubled heroine find ...

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Ranked according to the time of their last feature film release ...

(Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia, 2007)For numerically titled Russian movies of the moment, stick with 4 instead of 12. Old soul Nikita Mikhalkov’s appropriation of the 12 Angry Men template is a bloated ...

Within moments of meeting a woman on a train, Norman Oppenheimer offers—unsolicited— to introduce her to three prominent people. That’s how Norman operates: he’s a “fixer,” a seemingly well-connected ...

1. Johnny Guitar Nicholas Ray, 1954 2. Mouchette Robert Bresson, 1967 3. Laura Otto Preminger, 1944 4. Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick, 1975 5. Muriel Alain ...

(Warner Archive, $18.95)As John Ford said to a teenage Spielberg: “Where’s the horizon?” In Philip Kaufman’s 1974 film it rises almost to the top of the frame, an unforgiving expanse governed by harsh ...

Of course, Grahame was by this time largely a figure of celluloid memory: she was the flirtatious goofus of Zinnemann’s Oklahoma!, but, more typically, she was the Ur-noir siren (of Lang’s The Big ...

Premised on illusion and promising endless reanimation, cinema is often called the ghostliest of mediums. Ghosts are themselves cinematic in essence, automatic disruptions in space and time. Movies ...

For modernist poet H.D. and her contemporaries at the journal Close Up, the young medium of cinema lit up the room with soul-stirring force By Sheila O'Malley in the May-June 2020 Issue The Madonna of ...