The Way of Drama

Jan 12, 2024 — This week’s given us essays on Chantal Akerman and Edward Yang and conversations with Takeshi Kitano and Robert Bresson.

Nov 28, 2023 — Past Lives came out on top in New York, while Stonewalling triumphed in Taipei.

Dec 13, 2022 — A departure from the tales of sex and violence that defined Black cinema in the early 1970s, Michael Schultz’s beloved coming-of-age film celebrates the emotional bonds among a group of young Black men.

Oct 14, 2022 — Martin Scorsese remembers Jean-Luc Godard, Francine Prose admires Jafar Panahi, and Guy Maddin discusses his earliest and newest works.

Aug 16, 2022 — The Safdie brothers drew inspiration from their childhood memories for their first feature as codirectors, a terrifying yet wondrous portrait of an unpredictable father.

Jan 21, 2022 — When I received the email asking me to work on the cover art for the Criterion Collection edition of Citizen Kane, my emotions quickly went from pure joy to complete dread. What can be done for a film of this...

May 24, 2021 — We’re reading more about Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock and about Sofia Coppola and Stanley Kubrick.

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...