The Halt

Sep 18, 2017 — The wide-open vistas of Montana are the backdrop for three interlocking stories about women confronting the disappointments of small-town life.

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.

Jun 10, 2025 — At MoMA, curator David Schwartz celebrates seventeen landmark New York screening venues.

Dec 19, 2024 — One of history’s darkest chapters becomes a deeply personal experience in this adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel.

Dec 19, 2023 — Year’s end brings new translations of Serge Daney and Jean Cocteau and new books on Francis Ford Coppola and Jia Zhangke.

Jun 26, 2020 — This week’s history-seeped highlights explore queer cinema legacies, black stories on screen, and marketing movies while a pandemic rages.

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 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...