The High Price of Gay Life in Washington, D.C.
James Kirchick’s riveting history of gay life in Washington, D.C. is a Cold War epic of hypocrisy, surveillance, and survival.
James Kirchick’s riveting history of gay life in Washington, D.C. is a Cold War epic of hypocrisy, surveillance, and survival.
The piercing documentary ‘Who Killed Vincent Chin?’, airing on PBS on 20 June, shows how economic anxiety and racial demagoguery make a toxic brew.
Cooper Raiff’s romantic comedy about a likeable slacker falling for an older woman, Cha Cha Real Smooth, has a bullying need to be liked.
Robert Eggers’ witchy, weird, and pitilessly violent Viking revenge saga, The Northman, features operatic scope and magical imagery that will burn into your retinas.
Fintan O’Toole’s lucid history of Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is a vivid telling of how his country’s culture of silence and repression was broken open.
The subtle microaggressions in Mariama Diallo’s Master say far more about the sorry-not-sorry state of racial consciousness in America than the witch does.
Kogonada’s seemingly gentle sci-fi film After Yang carries an undercurrent of anger toward anthropocentric arrogance.
The same forces that tore apart societies from Yugoslavia to Iraq, Columbia, Northern Ireland, and the West Bank are fully present in the US, warns How Civil Wars Start.
Fellini’s fable about an innocent clown roaming postwar Italy with an abusive strongman, La Strada, has the romance of his later epics but a more potent sense of tragedy.
John McWhorter’s pushback against the antiracist orthodoxy of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi lands palpable hits but is too scattered to win the match.
Lynne Ramsay’s gutting, eerily beautiful first film, Ratcatcher, shows a director refusing to let the impoverished circumstances of her characters define them.
Todd Haynes’ audiovisual blast delves into the creative combat that birthed America’s first great avant-garde rock ‘n’ roll band, the Velvet Underground.