Life or Something Like It

Sep 18, 2019 — One Scene The way some rock fans talk about the sanctity of live music, you’d think it was a guaranteed path to transcendence. But of course most concerts fall far short of the sublime, and the thrill of breathing in...

Jul 2, 2019 — Father-child relationships come into focus in this week’s Short and Feature pairing on the Criterion Channel, which examines the trauma of coming of age with an emotionally unstable parent. Presented with Víctor Erice’s El Sur, Charles Williams’s All These Creatures follows...

Jun 28, 2019 — This week’s highlights include an oral history of one of Kubrick’s most challenging sequences and reviews of the latest works from Béla Tarr and Paul Thomas Anderson.

May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...

Nov 14, 2018 — He transformed a fledgling comic book publisher into a juggernaut brand.

Oct 18, 2018 — An autumnal round of reviews, excerpts, interviews, and news.

Jan 17, 2018 — “My appreciation for his inspiring and innovative cinema grows deeper as the years go by,” writes Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa in an essay that Jonathan Rosenbaum’s posted on his site, “Reflections on Kiarostami’s Two-Way Mirrors.” A new and expanded edition of their...

Nov 21, 2017 — Ernst Lubitsch’s “world is defined by time as much as place,” writes Daniel Witkin in the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time. “Anachronistically straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, his characters embody unfashionable virtues of discretion and tact...

Nov 12, 2017 — In Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, Nancy Schoenberger “has hidden a provocative thesis,” suggests Stephen Metcalf, writing for the Atlantic. “She asks us to remember the beauty of masculine self-mastery as...

Jul 19, 2017 — “Yvonne Rainer stands as one of the most influential choreographers of the past fifty-plus years,” begins Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice. “In 1962 she co-founded the Judson Dance Theater, that exalted wellspring of experimental movement; a decade later, she...