The Christmas Spirit

Nov 18, 2018 — This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

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...

Sep 23, 2014 — In director Jack Clayton’s hands, Henry James’s tale of the sinister and sensual things hiding behind Victorian decorum becomes one of the screen’s great works of terror.

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

Nov 2, 2009 —  The term holiday movie doesn’t have to conjure Christmas carols or miracles at Macy’s. Case in point: the personal, even skewed, films chosen by a few filmmakers as their holiday favorites for a seasonal special section in the New York...

Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.

Mar 11, 2020 — One Scene With his Oscar-nominated debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, director Benh Zeitlin brought to the screen a vision of Louisiana that combined the unique flavors and textures of his adopted home state with the magical twists and...

Feb 1, 2019 — A cast of dolls and a rhino are featured in this year’s award-winners, and Steven Soderbergh has previewed his new film.

Feb 27, 2018 — Director Tony Richardson refracts the bawdy spirit of the 1960s through this brilliantly distilled take on an eighteenth-century picaresque.

Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...