Author Spotlight

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the author of thirteen novels, including Chronic City and Brooklyn Crime Novel. His writings on film include the monograph They Live; liner notes for releases of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, Thom Andersen’s Red Hollywood, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours; and contributions to box sets devoted to John Cassavetes and Wong Kar Wai.

7 Results
The Big Heat: Fate’s Network

Made nearly two decades into Fritz Lang’s Hollywood career, this brutal noir is designed for maximum velocity and impact, eschewing the director’s accustomed flourishes in favor of a stark literalness.

By Jonathan Lethem

The Trial: Crime of the Century

In the film he once called his best, Orson Welles found a cinematic language equal to Franz Kafka’s distinctive effects, creating a vertiginous experience that accentuates the writer’s subterranean perversity.

By Jonathan Lethem

First Person

Empty Theaters

The author of The Fortress of Solitude considers the meditative, “brain-rinsing” effects of the solo moviegoing experience.

By Jonathan Lethem

The Magnificent Ambersons

Loving the Ruins; or, Does The Magnificent Ambersons Exist?

The holiest of holies for lovers of ruined and neglected cinema, Orson Welles’s 1942 masterpiece haunts us with its voids and absences, which echo its tale of a family’s destruction.

By Jonathan Lethem

Boyhood: The Moment Seizes You

Filmed over the course of twelve years, Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age portrait is an astonishing experiment in cinematic time.

By Jonathan Lethem

The Killers: The Citizen Kane of Noir
The Killers (1946) is exemplary film noir from Robert Siodmak, who, on the strength of three films—this, Phantom Lady (1944), and Criss Cross (1949)—stands beside his fellow European exiles Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger as one of noir’s crucial…

By Jonathan Lethem

Unfaithfully Yours: Zeno, Achilles, and Sir Alfred
Unfaithfully Yours is the outlier among Sturges's masterpieces. The first seven were unveiled in an improbable stretch, from 1940 to 1943, when he seemed incapable of doing wrong, and they were to varying degrees hits, while Unfaithfully Yours bled t…

By Jonathan Lethem