Despair

Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...

May 28, 2020 — Check out what’s in store next month on our streaming service!

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

May 11, 2020 — This week’s round comes loaded with lists: 100 novels about cinema, fifty novelizations, and dozens of Sheila O’Malley’s favorite biographies.

Apr 16, 2020 — Olivia Laing and Rebecca Mead find restorative consolation in the writing of the renowned filmmaker, painter, and gardener.

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

Feb 24, 2020 — “Look, Rose, find someone who isn’t sick. The ground’s covered with them.” Kirk Douglas in The Story of Three Loves Kirk Douglas’s casual mode is a look of anguished alertness. He has as an inbuilt ability to register tension, anxiety,...

Feb 18, 2020 — In what was no doubt an appeal to subtitle-averse audiences, advertisements for the U.S. release of Teorema (1968) trumpeted, “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema—but it says everything!” A meager few of those utterances are expended in an...

Feb 11, 2020 — The universal success of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is undoubtedly due to a skill that the director has demonstrated over the course of several decades and many enduring pieces of work. But it is also a sign of our times. What...