Real Life

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Nov 29, 2018 — The largest retrospective in the U.S. yet is on through mid-December.

Nov 26, 2018 — The Magnificent Ambersons In his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich published as This Is Orson Welles, Welles speaks nostalgically of the time he spent with his father in a tranquil enclave of 1920s Illinois, comparing it to “a childhood back in...

Nov 26, 2018 — The legendary filmmaker possessed the greatest speaking voice in American cinema, and The Magnificent Ambersons represents the summit of his work as a vocal actor.

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Nov 20, 2018 — A sampling of reviews of some of the most significant movies currently in theaters.

Nov 19, 2018 — Billy Wilder proves himself one of cinema’s greatest pleasure seekers in this irresistible confection, a landmark of Hollywood comedy.

Nov 18, 2018 — This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

Nov 15, 2018 — In two made-for-television productions, a middle-aged Ingmar Bergman blurred the boundaries between screen and stage.

Oct 31, 2018 — Lists of favorites from a genre on the rise.