The Way of Drama

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Apr 22, 2020 — One of the true dark glories of the Czechoslovak New Wave, The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol, 1969) is the most popular and indelible work by the underappreciated Juraj Herz and remained a firm favorite of the director’s among his many films....

Nov 29, 2019 — Since its debut in 2003, the online film publication Reverse Shot has found playful and provocative ways of blurring the boundaries between presumed opposites. With their tradition of symposiums—collections of newly commissioned essays on various topics and questions in film...

Nov 15, 2019 — It’s a strange feeling: adoring cinema while at the same time always sensing that it’s not made for you. This is how I felt growing up, at least. I came of age watching movies, crushing on them so hard that...

May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...

Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...

Sep 7, 2018 — F ew filmographies encapsulate the rebellious spirit of American cinema in the seventies better than that of Hal Ashby, who crafted an astonishing string of movies that stretched across the span of the decade. Finding success as an editor early...

Jul 17, 2018 — Without doubt, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape struck a nerve when it was released in 1989. Astonishingly, it still does today. Among the most storied of American independent films, it debuted at the U.S. Film Festival (soon to be renamed the...

Jul 16, 2018 — The legendary baseball writer talks about the no-nonsense pleasures of one of the all-time great sports movies and the classic essay he wrote about it.

Apr 2, 2018 — Updates are still coming into the first entry on this year’s New Directors/New Films running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This entry will take us all the way through...