All Is True

Jun 21, 2022 — Two eras of Hong Kong history collide in this exquisite ghost story, which solidified director Stanley Kwan’s status as one of cinema’s truest romantics.

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.

Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.

Oct 23, 2024 — This month brings new books on Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, unhappy writers, and classic documentaries.

Mar 18, 2022 — With a collection of her films now available on the Criterion Channel, the director behind Still Processing discusses the radically personal nature of her work.

Apr 7, 2021 — Songbook Zula knocks back two shots like they’re water, picks up a brimming martini glass, and struts right up to her current lover’s former lover—a poetess, at that—to introduce herself. “Bon soir,” says Zula, French still a little heavier on...

Sep 6, 2017 — When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at Sundance, I gathered a first round of reviews, beginning with Justin Chang’s for the Los Angeles Times: “Adapted from Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound sketches a vivid, dirt-under-the-nails panorama of 1940s Mississippi farm country, centered...

Jul 11, 2017 — A forged note brings chaos and corruption to the lives of everyone it touches in Robert Bresson’s devastating final film.

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

Nov 2, 2009 — The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire. And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a...