The Room Next Door

Jul 23, 2021 — Deep Dives In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own...

Feb 11, 2021 — The body never lies.Instead, it keeps score, with our very gestures and walk and physical eccentricities speaking to the traumas and desires we’d like to keep hidden. But there are some people so aware of this truth, and the power...

Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Oct 16, 2019 — Deep Dives “I have a feeling that the really crucial moments in a film should be wordless,” the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray once said. He was speaking of his 1964 masterpiece Charulata, whose action consists largely of soulful looks passing...

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Nov 7, 2017 — A haughty socialite is torn between the affections of three men in George Cukor’s blissful comedy of manners.

Sep 26, 2017 — The sexual pedagogy of a masochistic music instructor takes center stage in this shocking study of art, control, and repression.

Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.

Jul 5, 2016 — Arthur Hiller’s 1979 comedy pairs Alan Arkin and Peter Falk as unlikely comrades in a madcap farce that lands every laugh.