The Drama

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

May 24, 2021 — We’re reading more about Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock and about Sofia Coppola and Stanley Kubrick.

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...

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...

Dec 3, 2019 — As the title card comes up, the movie has already begun, with a frontal view of a dilapidated plantation house, its ivied columns sporadically lit up by a raging storm. Spectators at the time of the film’s release who were...

Oct 23, 2019 — With 2002’s Frida, Julie Taymor brought her bold imagination to the dramatic life story of a singular artist: the iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Made just five years after she found staggering success on Broadway with The Lion King, Taymor’s...

May 30, 2019 — It was more than three decades ago, in early 1986, that David Lynch arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina, to begin shooting his fourth feature, Blue Velvet. The surreal and emotionally overpowering neonoir that began to take shape there would go on to become...

Mar 12, 2019 — By dint of perseverance, Harold Lloyd, the modest son of Burchard, Nebraska, became the prince of Hollywood, California, where he lived the Horatio Alger dream. His life and his memorable films alike echo Alger’s theme of young men who apply...

Sep 5, 2018 — It took a while for Paul Feig—the director behind such smash-hit comedies as Bridesmaids and Spy—to come around to the darker side of cinema. Back in his college days, the filmmaker appreciated the superior technique of the dramas and foreign films he saw in his...

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...