The Great Love

Nov 10, 2020 — The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many...

Dec 12, 2019 — Almost from the moment it arrived on screens in early 2006, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy was celebrated as a new milestone for American cinema, even an expression of independent filmmaking’s delayed arrival at maturity. In relating its deceptively simple tale...

Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...

Feb 12, 2019 — In a stark, forbidding prison, a nun ascends a staircase, framed by vertical bars, and walks down a corridor, unlocking cell doors. Women start coming out; two of them quarrel. Smoking on her bunk, one inmate sighs when told she...

Oct 19, 2015 — Take a look back at critics’ initial reactions to David Lynch’s haunting masterpiece Mulholland Dr.

Sep 2, 2015 — We love it when great novelists write about cinema—they’re often able to capture something ineffable and magical about the form that critics may have come to take for granted. Case in point: the New York Review of Books has posted...

Jan 5, 2015 — Who is Tootsie, anyway?

Oct 4, 2013 — Did You See This?• Guillermo del Toro goes to Springfield and enters a Cabinet of Curiosities. • Call Lena Dunham—there’s a new girl in town. • The art of the vamp • A glimpse of the latest from Costa-Gavras •...

May 21, 2013 — It’s tough to tell where reality ends and fiction begins in Haskell Wexler’s deft chronicle of a turbulent era.

Mar 27, 2012 — Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they...