Love Life

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Apr 17, 2018 — The past couple of days have seen lineup announcements from Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight, and of course, last week, the main event, the Cannes Film Festival presented the bulk of its lineup for the seventy-first edition running from May...

Oct 27, 2017 — This has to be one of the most tentative “in the works” roundups yet. The top three items relate to projects that may never be realized, but they’re certainly intriguing enough to make note of here.Mark Frost, for example, who...

Aug 11, 2017 — With his controversial new film Nocturama opening in theaters, French director Bertrand Bonello spoke with us about what inspires him as an artist and how he blurs the line between realism and abstraction.

Aug 12, 2015 — Director Karel Reisz and writer Harold Pinter’s brilliant adaptation of John Fowles’s novel focuses on the experiences of women in two radically different eras.

Sep 16, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.

Aug 5, 2013 — For those of us who rank The Earrings of Madame de . . . at the top of our list of all-time favorite films, the mystery is why our passion isn’t universally shared. Every year, thanks to committed revival houses,...

Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...

Feb 5, 2025 — Starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, the film is a vivid record of the art life in 1970s New York.