A Romantic Comedy

Jul 13, 2017 — “The spirit of Seijun Suzuki, patron saint of avant-garde Japanese filmmakers, presides over the Japan Society's 11th annual Japan Cuts program, a consistently exciting survey of innovative Nipponese cinema,” writes Simon Abrams at the top of his preview for RogerEbert.com....

Feb 25, 2025 — Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

May 11, 2021 — When Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, in the summer of 1982, I was almost exactly the same age as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton, getting ready to start my sophomore year in high school. Like Stacy’s world-weary older...

Feb 29, 1988 — Marx Brothers aficionados have argued for years over the relative merits of A Night at the Opera and the “purer” Marx movies such as Duck Soup. Certainly there’s no comparison on a point-by-point basis: Duck Soup is a classic of...

Jul 17, 2024 — This month, we’re celebrating the expansive, archetype-exploding films of Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as the career of his frequent collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Jun 30, 2017 — “Founded in 1946 and situated in the picturesque Czech spa town,” the “Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) is seen as one of the most prestigious events on the circuit,” writes Orlando Parfitt at the top of his preview of...

Nov 14, 2016 — For his first foray into romantic comedy, Paul Thomas Anderson worked closely with Jon Brion on a score that combines melodic orchestration with startling dissonance.

The writer and director shares his love for Monterey Pop and the way it acts as a time capsule of its era, talks about how The Worst Person in the World redefined the romantic comedy, and praises Wes Anderson’s use...

An elegiac take on James Joyce, a romantic swashbuckler, a portrait of grief, a searing drama, a feel-good comedy, four global gems, a chronicle of China’s new century, a revisionist western, and a twenty-first-century masterwork.

James Harvey is a playwright, essayist and critic. He is the author of Movie Love in the Fifties and Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books and the...