The Stage

Apr 14, 2023 — This week: Interviews with Rob Tregenza and Ari Aster and new writing on Lubitsch, Jarmusch, and Laura Citarella.

Nov 16, 2022 — After glimpsing his great-great-grandfather on-screen, a writer searches for the history of a landmark silent film.

Jan 12, 2022 — Gifted with the looks and suavity of a young Elvis, the “Wicked Game” crooner shares with David Lynch an obsession with 1950s Americana—and a knowledge of the darkness at its heart.

Mar 16, 2021 — This year’s virtual edition offers seventy-five features over five days.

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Aug 10, 2020 — A slyly feminist film by the only woman directing in the Hollywood studio system of her thirties-and-early-forties heyday, Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance stands as one of the era’s most groundbreaking—and entertaining—backstage sagas. And as it turned out, a different...

Apr 10, 2020 — This week we’re reading Peter Wollen on Performance, Thomas Elsaesser on puzzle movies, David Bordwell on how movies work, and more.

Apr 7, 2020 — Before the 1990s, the era when the power centers of fashion began to be much more numerous and dispersed, decades could be easily identified by the most prominent looks and cuts of their pervasive styles. The closet of the sixties...

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

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...