The Son

Jul 21, 2025 — Summer offers new biographies and memoirs, expansively big ideas, and more than a few curious fictions.

May 21, 2025 — Lee reunites with Denzel Washington, who has been given an honorary Palme d’Or in Cannes.

Apr 29, 2025 — In this exuberant and moving portrait of a Brooklyn sex worker, Sean Baker draws on themes he has explored throughout his career, depicting the workaday grind of twenty-first-century American existence with biting humor and clear-eyed humanity.

Apr 22, 2025 — Adaptations, Hollywood histories, and Satyajit Ray’s cover designs feature in this month’s roundup.

Dec 11, 2024 — Sean Baker’s eighth feature has been picking up awards and nominations and landing on several best-of-2024 lists.

Oct 8, 2024 — Though it received dismissive reviews upon its release, this chillingly nihilistic horror film has since influenced such masters as Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Rivette with its low-budget evocation of anxiety and indeterminacy.

Aug 27, 2024 — A brilliant satire, inspired by a 1973 PBS documentary series that gave rise to the reality-television genre, Albert Brooks’s first feature film examines the ethical dilemmas of combining cheap entertainment and sociological experiment.

Jul 29, 2024 — Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.

Jul 23, 2024 — Unlike the string of early-1980s sex comedies that it superficially resembles, Paul Brickman’s debut feature fuses fierce social satire and dark, dreamy eroticism with unexpectedly rich and ambiguous results.

Jun 18, 2024 — We’re diving deeper this month into a new Elaine May biography and memoirs from Susan Seidelman and Griffin Dunne.