Category: the classics
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The Cautious Optimism of ‘The Big City’
‘The Big City’ is blunt about the professional and personal difficulties that come with shifting tides.
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Overnight Successes and Falls from Grace in ‘Babylon’
‘Babylon’ intoxicatingly — if exaggeratedly and not always accurately — evokes the sugar-rush quality of silent moviemaking and the behind-the-scenes dramas surrounding them.
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‘À Nos Amours’ is One of the Great Coming-of-Age Movies
Where other directors might moralize or condescendingly diagnose, Maurice Pialat delicately and sensitively handles the emotional complications of a teenage girl’s budding sex life.
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The Quiet Menace of ‘La Cérémonie’
Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert make for an unsettling pair in Claude Chabrol’s excellent psychological thriller.
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‘The Fabelmans’ is One of the Year’s Best Movies
‘The Fabelmans’ is, among other things, a sublime love letter to the joys of filmmaking.
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The Slow-Burning Dread of ‘Affliction’
‘Affliction’ is a frightening drama about the ripple effects of abuse.
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‘In the Bedroom’ is a Powerful Meditation on Grief
On actor turned director Todd Field’s first effort as a filmmaker.
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Bad Love in ‘Decision to Leave’ and ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
New movies from Park Chan-wook and Martin McDonagh, reviewed.
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‘The Thing’ is an Early High for John Carpenter
Though initially poorly received, Carpenter’s 1981 masterpiece is now rightfully recognized for what it always was.
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Cate Blanchett Gives Her Best Performance Yet in ‘Tár’
Plus: Christian Tafdrup’s ‘Speak No Evil.’
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‘Across the 110th Street’ is a Bleak, Ambivalent Police Procedural
The film is a high-water mark for the 1970s procedural.
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‘Blue Collar”s Frankness Takes You Aback
‘Blue Collar’ doesn’t end on a hopeful note akin to the more widely seen, and still-good, mainstream unionization drama ‘Norma Rae,’ which came out the next year. It wades in, and stays put in, the hell of working a hard, badly paying job
Peterson Reviews 