The Exam

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.

Feb 12, 2020 — If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of  the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. You grew up amid the reverberation of past earthquakes—all their...

Jan 13, 2020 — Soon after completing his 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer turned his attention to a genre he had not yet explored on-screen, undertaking to make a horror movie that was, in his...

Jan 7, 2020 — Understudies everywhere should take heart at the tale of Katharine Hepburn’s long history with the role of Linda Seton, the high-spirited but reclusive heiress she plays in George Cukor’s 1938 Holiday. When the Philip Barry play the film is based...

Dec 20, 2019 — This week we’re spotlighting directors’ and writers’ appreciations of other directors and writers, plus Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda.

Dec 3, 2019 — As the title card comes up, the movie has already begun, with a frontal view of a dilapidated plantation house, its ivied columns sporadically lit up by a raging storm. Spectators at the time of the film’s release who were...

Nov 26, 2019 — In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte...

Nov 21, 2019 — A richly varied showcase of Korean films made between 1996 and 2003 opens in New York.

Sep 5, 2019 — Critics split three ways: Joker is just plain great, or great but dangerous, or dangerous and also really quite bad.

Sep 3, 2019 — Early reviews of Gray’s space odyssey are strong—and even stronger for Brad Pitt.