The Heart

Nov 26, 2024 — In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.

Oct 19, 2023 — Her entrance in the film is impossible to forget. She swings into the scene to serve a patron some coffee, holding a cup in one hand and a book in the other. Her diamond-shaped face is obscured, but her aura...

Mar 28, 2022 — Rosine Mbakam’s documentaries are exercises in reconfiguring relations of power. Her first three nonfiction features are all portraits of Cameroonian women, each of whom is invited to participate in coconstructing a cinematic space of testimony, candor, and expressive autonomy. Filmed...

May 7, 2021 — The house on Walnut Road was and still is, among other things, a movie house. That becomes vividly clear in Michael Koresky’s searching and tender new memoir, Films of Endearment, in which he returns to this beloved childhood home several times over the...

Mar 16, 2021 — In Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), play is a life force, pleasure a form of liberation. Drawing inspiration from cartoons, Hollywood musicals, and the vaudeville shenanigans of early screen comedy in the vein of Buster Keaton and the Marx...

Oct 26, 2020 — The very first romantic kiss between men on American television happens in Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking film Tongues Untied. That kiss is between two Black men, and one of them is Riggs himself. As of this writing, if you look up...

Apr 28, 2020 — “Fuck! Fuck you fuck me fuck old people fuck children fuck peace! Fuck peace.”Miranda July shouts at her car’s steering wheel. With a black Sharpie, she scrawls FUCK in huge letters on the inside of her windshield. She drives. Sunlight...

Jan 28, 2020 — Motherhood is a recurring subject in the films of Pedro Almodóvar. The mothers in his movies are fierce, passionate, and resourceful—often in varying combinations, and to varying extremes. In Almodóvar’s darkly satirical fourth feature, What Have I Done to Deserve...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Oct 2, 2018 — Performances There’s an irreducible reserve about Kristen Stewart, an appearance of not doing much on-screen, that I mistook for lack of talent when I first saw her mumbling into her shirt in the Twilight franchise. Still, playing Bella Swan, chastity...