The Music of Silence

Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...

Nov 23, 2008 — The possession of a real voice is always a marvel, an almost religious thing.

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...

Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

Jun 4, 2019 — Before The Dead Don’t Die opens in theaters, two series offer crash courses on a singular oeuvre.

Jan 29, 2024 — Jurors, audiences, and critics seem to agree that 2024 is off to a promising start.

Feb 12, 2021 — This week we’re revisiting Tarkovsky, catching up with Shelley Duvall, and listening to Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino talk movies.

Oct 17, 2017 — In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.

Mar 22, 2021 — Here’s what the critics have been saying about the winners of the two main competitions.