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.

Land of the Pharaohs (1955, Howard Hawks). When I first saw it, as a kid, Land of the Pharaohs became my favorite film. I’d always been addicted to historical epics, but this one was different: it ...

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2. Many of you, perhaps most, have never heard of the man. So much the better. Not all news gets into newspapers, and not all movies get into theaters. The sculptor Paul Thek once proposed an ...

Peter Tscherkassky will be receiving the Underground Spirit Award for “outstanding work in independent filmmaking” at the Paliç European Film Festival this month, and it’s easy to see why. Ever since ...

At that performance, director Robert Rossen was impressed, and later cast Hackman in a small role in LILITH with Warren Beatty. Three years later, Beatty remembered Hackman and cast him in BONNIE AND ...

This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2023 coverage. Read all the lists here. One of the benefits of the streaming-industrial complex and its rapacious and insatiable lust for content is that ...

The results are in for our 2023 poll of Film Comment’s contributors! On this page, you’ll find our list of the best films that were released either theatrically or virtually in 2023 in the United ...

It’s been a good year, cinematically speaking, for hit men in Paris. John Wick: Chapter 4 staged its wittiest set pieces in the City of Lights, whirling a bone-crushing melee around the Arc de ...

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 instance, what, in the United States in 2010, made a then-unknown 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence so riveting in Winter’s Bone, the film that vaulted her—now the highest paid actress in ...

Present Tense is a column by Sheila O’Malley that reflects on the intersections of film, literature, art, and culture. Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway in Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, 1993) The ...