From What Is Before

Oct 21, 2019 — Songbook If you weren’t a devotee of the Cantopop world in the early 1990s, the casting of Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) may not have caught your attention. Starring in her first major role, the singer looked...

Oct 7, 2019 — Critics respond to the New York Film Festival’s selection of new moving image art.

Sep 25, 2019 — Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson star as a couple whose breakup turns nasty at the hands of “the divorce-industrial complex.”

Sep 4, 2019 — After Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, it’s Timothée Chalamet’s turn to lead the English to the Battle of Agincourt.

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...

Aug 7, 2019 — The last two days have seen an avalanche of titles filling up the fall festival lineups.

Jun 7, 2019 — He is the most disarming and self-effacing of the English actors who dominated stage and screen in the middle of the twentieth century—the others were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Those fellows carried themselves like grand...

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...

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...

Mar 8, 2019 — Claire Denis in Film Comment, an ongoing project at Directed by Women, and Glenda Jackson and Meryl Streep in conversation are among this week’s highlights.