The Man Without a Past

Sep 17, 2025 — One of the most influential comedies of the 1980s, Rob Reiner’s rock-and-roll satire is a remarkably authentic, lived-in portrait of musicians, their egotism, and the industry that feeds off their stardom.

Jul 22, 2025 — In his achingly beautiful debut feature, Kenneth Lonergan captures the dynamics of a sibling relationship shaped by grief, revealing its complexities with narrative economy and deep emotion.

Mar 25, 2025 — Set in a grimy, unglamorous version of Los Angeles, Arthur Penn’s Watergate-era neonoir tells the story of an honorable private eye acutely conscious of living in an era that is the mere shadow of a nobler past.

Mar 26, 2024 — In her first fiction film, director Alice Diop brings the skills of observation she has learned from her documentary work to a thought-provoking exploration of race, power, and motherhood.

Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Jul 7, 2021 — In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai—or the global art-house phenomenon they generated—without these extraordinary performers;...

Jan 20, 2021 — Knausgaard on Bergman and Adam Nayman on Armond White on Steven Spielberg are among this month’s highlights.

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

Oct 29, 2019 — Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a...