A Letter of Love

Aug 5, 2013 — For those of us who rank The Earrings of Madame de . . . at the top of our list of all-time favorite films, the mystery is why our passion isn’t universally shared. Every year, thanks to committed revival houses,...

Jul 8, 2013 — With its marvelous, distinctive camera work, Kenji Mizoguchi’s searing drama is as technically remarkable as it is humane.

Jul 22, 2025 — An era-defining reckoning with the sexual revolution, Mike Nichols’s controversial drama develops a rigorous form for analyzing what we have recently come to call “toxic masculinity.”

May 10, 2023 — The critic and memoirist expands on her 2017 essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”

Nov 22, 2022 — Spike Lee’s transcendent portrait of an American hero is an urgent call for the nation to live up to everything it claims to be.

Jan 1, 2022 — Ring in the new year with the French New Wave, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and a look back at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Jun 17, 2021 — The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience...

Mar 3, 2021 — Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Dénes Nagy’s Natural Light compete at the Berlinale.

Jun 9, 2020 — A couple walk down a cacophonous street in New York. They’re bundled in coats—wrapped up in their own worlds. She is incandescent with joy, talking about her cadre of close friends and their regular meetings. He wears a resigned face,...