Work It

May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...

Apr 23, 2019 — It’s unlikely that anyone who pays attention to contemporary short films will be unfamiliar with our selection this week on the Criterion Channel, which took the film-festival circuit by storm last year, garnering dozens of awards and an Oscar nomination....

Mar 26, 2019 — It’s the afternoon of February 8, 1964, and Ed Sullivan has assembled a gaggle of CBS ushers to talk about tomorrow night’s show, featuring the four lads from Liverpool who call themselves the Beetles—strike that, the Beatles. He needs to...

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Jun 20, 2018 — A Motion Selfie is a wryly comic silent film made by a crew of one.

May 19, 2018 — Talky, dense, and long, the follow-up to the Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep is also visually splendorous.

Mar 24, 2018 — Just a day or two after Stephen Hawking left us on March 14, Isaac Butler called up Errol Morris for Slate to talk about A Brief History of Time (1991), the documentary that takes it title from Hawking’s surprise bestseller....

Dec 14, 2017 — Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama is a sixty-two film series now running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York through January 7. “Sam Fuller famously defined cinema as ‘emotion,’ and just about every variety of it may be...

Oct 24, 2017 — In this intimate psychological thriller, Olivier Assayas interrogates contemporary society’s near-religious reliance on technology and its mediation of reality.

Oct 17, 2017 — Paul Thomas Anderson’s next film—and very likely Daniel Day-Lewis’s last—now has a release date, Christmas Day, and its own website. In Phantom Thread, Anderson “will once again explore a distinctive milieu of the 20th century. The new movie is a...