The Big One

Nov 19, 2020 — One Scene Acutely attuned to the drama of intimate relationships and interactions, writer-director-producer Sean Durkin mines their dynamics for his quietly simmering character studies. Best known for his feature debut, Martha Macy May Marlene, which premiered at Sundance in 2011 and...

Aug 31, 2020 — “Movies show us ourselves as we had not yet learned to recognize us—something in the nature of daily being or happening that quickly gets folded over into ancient history like yesterday’s newspaper, but in so doing a new face has...

Aug 18, 2020 — Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s restless, captivating Direct Cinema triumph Town Bloody Hall is a work of oceanography, documenting one splashy moment in the cresting and crashing of American feminism’s second wave. The film chronicles the “Dialogue on Women’s...

Jul 6, 2020 — Songbook In the blue moonlight of a humid December night, an escape is underway. A man in army fatigues runs from an open-air cell with a rolled-up rug in one hand and a sword in the other, stolen from someone...

Jul 5, 2020 — Among today’s most revered jazz musicians, pianist and composer Jason Moran stands out for how seamlessly he blends tradition and innovation. Throughout his now two-decade career, he has honored the complex history of one of America’s most storied art forms...

Jun 24, 2020 — It was audiences, not critics, that made hits out of such movies as St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), Batman Forever (1995), and Phone Booth (2002).

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Mar 16, 2020 — This month we’re reading about Helen Scott, a liaison between Paris and Hollywood; Anna Karina’s novels; William Faulkner’s screenplays; and more.