Seems Like Old Times

May 6, 2024 — Perhaps the most hard-to-categorize of the great Hollywood studios came into its own with a string of critically acclaimed films based on popular books and plays, including Born Yesterday, A Raisin in the Sun, and From Here to Eternity.

Oct 24, 2023 — The season brings Barbra Streisand’s memories, the “joyously vulgar” Burton and Taylor, and the story of Siskel and Ebert.

Dec 29, 2022 — Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Catherine Breillat, Michael Mann, Christian Petzold, David Fincher . . .

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...

Apr 28, 2008 — The simplicity and emotional clarity of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 The Red Balloon have made it one of the most beloved films of all time. The narrative is deceptively airy and pared down: Pascal, a young Parisian boy, retrieves a balloon...

May 26, 2003 — Embracing the world while pretending to sneer at it, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s crime film is rich, deep, and wily.

Aug 21, 2024 — This month brings a new biography of Agnès Varda, collections from Phillip Lopate and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and some hefty coffee-table accessories.

Jun 20, 2023 — In their first collaboration, director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter explore the cultural fissures in modern England by dramatizing a kind of role-play in which no role is stable or easy to define.

Jun 30, 2021 — First Person The first thing I’d like to note is that long before I was briefly an usher in a movie theater, my father was briefly an usher in a movie theater. That might not be so much in my...

Jan 12, 2021 — In the course of selling or promoting a film, a director will invariably be asked, “What’s this movie really about?” The desired answer is usually predetermined—marketers want a concise, two-sentence hook; reporters want a sound bite; critics want a thesis...