Beyond the Mat

Sep 24, 2025 — Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.

Jun 10, 2025 — Sidney Lumet’s lavish adaptation of a Tony Award–winning stage musical combines an ecstatic appreciation of Black artistry with a celebration of freedom and perseverance.

Jan 24, 2025 — We’re sampling new issues of Notebook, Senses of Cinema, and 032c and reading about Eisenstein and Charlotte Zwerin.

Jan 21, 2025 — Lynchian may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

Jun 18, 2024 — In this stylish erotic noir, Lilly and Lana Wachowski delight in destabilizing our genre and gender expectations, laying the foundation for the trans sensibility that runs through all their work.

Aug 22, 2023 — In 1962, the young Bo Widerberg threw a grenade into the complacent waters of Swedish cinema. It came in the form of four articles in the evening newspaper Expressen—followed by a book version titled Vision in 
Swedish Film—in which Widerberg...

Mar 20, 2023 — The author of the novel Fiona and Jane looks back on a relationship that never quite solidified—and a future that never quite arrived—through the prism of Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Feb 14, 2023 — Entrenched as an authoritative adaptation, this Oscar-winning hit is still admired, taught, and studied today for its spectacular re-creation of the past and its reinvention of the Shakespearean spoken word.

Jan 31, 2023 — In this shape-shifting exploration of creativity, couplehood, and artistic influence, Mia Hansen-Løve offers a glimpse at the existential heavy lift required by her deceptively simple autofictions.

Jan 10, 2023 — In its ambivalence toward its provocative themes, John M. Stahl’s groundbreaking exploration of racial identity demonstrates the insolubility of Hollywood’s representational conundrum.