I Like Movies

Dec 8, 2023 — Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage), the jittery protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 2003 crime comedy Matchstick Men, doesn’t like to think of himself as a common crook. “I’m a con artist,” he insists, and—in a frenzy of self-justification—further explains: “They give me...

Dec 7, 2023 — Nearly half of the films premiering in January will come from first-time directors, but there’ll also be new work from Steven Soderbergh and Richard Linklater.

Dec 6, 2023 — American Fiction, May December, and Past Lives lead with five each, and Showing Up has already won the Robert Altman Award.

Dec 5, 2023 — A tight-lipped stranger arrives in a gold-mining town. After checking into a hotel, he heads to Charlie’s Saloon, one of those gambling palaces with glittering chandeliers and be-feathered hostesses. He is told that Charlie “runs the town” and “owns a...

Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.

Nov 10, 2023 — Black mothers’ stories come around again, Matt Wolf probes the archives, and Lizzie Borden conjures the streets of mid-1980s New York.

Nov 7, 2023 — By the end of the 1970s, everything had changed for Jackie Chan. He had cowritten, directed, and starred in The Fearless Hyena, which became the top-grossing Hong Kong film of 1979. His next project, The Young Master, would top that...

Oct 24, 2023 — This November, learn the art of the con from some of cinema’s craftiest swindlers, or saddle up alongside some of the most complex and determined female characters in the history of the western.

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Oct 13, 2023 — Look who’s talking: Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Gregg Araki . . .