Emotion

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

Jul 18, 2019 — With its picturesque Provençal village, florid theatrical dialogue, and cast of familiar southern-French actors, dominated by the formidable Raimu, The Baker’s Wife is classic Marcel Pagnol territory. In 1938, when the film was released, the feted author and playwright was...

Jul 5, 2019 — This week, we look back on the making of If...., black filmmakers in the 1990s, and the golden age of Mexican cinema.

Jun 17, 2019 — Performances I can’t remember a time in my childhood when I saw a grown-up cry. It wasn’t that the elders around me were all that even-tempered; most of them were no less capable of lashing out in anger or indignation...

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

May 29, 2019 — Once again, Lav Diaz and Takashi Miike did what they do; but the Fortnight also showcased a wide range of promising talent.

May 23, 2019 — Performances Those who have recently discovered Kim Minhee will know her as the magnetic actress in Park Chan-wook’s lascivious thriller The Handmaiden, in which she made the clinical act of tooth-filing a new form of eroticism, and in Hong Sangsoo’s...

May 21, 2019 — Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) is one of the great films about middle-aged loneliness, specifically—though not exclusively—as women feel it. It’s not a dating movie, though there’s dating in it. And it’s not a feeling-sorry-for-oneself movie, though there are...

May 19, 2019 — Critics are finding the young Russian director’s second feature to be bleak yet irresistibly masterful.

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...