Last Words

Oct 18, 2009 —  So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...

Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.

Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...

Jan 22, 2026 — This visually stunning masterpiece from Kazakh New Wave iconoclast Ardak Amirkulov is one of the few films that looks evil in the eye without flinching.

Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...

Mar 24, 2011 — Costumer Lindy Hemming began her decades-long collaboration with Mike Leigh at London’s Hampstead Theater Club, where the director, with his now legendary method of extended improvisation, was guiding his company toward what would become, in April 1977, Abigail’s Party. “At...

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 23, 2017 — Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-nominated breakthrough revels in the complexities of the female psyche.

Jul 16, 2009 — The venerable critic Andrew Sarris, now eighty-one years old, gets his due in a lovely profile in the New York Times by Michael Powell (no, not that one). This die-hard auteurist, who has contributed writing and been featured in on-screen...

May 12, 2008 — This intensely personal work about a self-destructive young man would help alleviate Louis Malle’s doubts about his career.