The Conjuring 2

May 8, 2020 — The opening and closing credits in a film are a form of housekeeping, fulfilling a legal obligation to compile the names of cast and crew who made the final product possible. Visionary designer Saul Bass saw the aesthetic potential in...

Jan 28, 2025 — Rose Byrne stars as a frazzled therapist taking on a relentless string of crises.

Nov 8, 2011 — With the very first shots of Fanny and Alexander (1982), director Ingmar Bergman announces his perspective and signals his intentions. Here, we find the ten-year-old Alexander gazing into a puppet theater, lifting layer after layer of skillfully painted backdrop. We...

Jan 19, 2021 — In the summer of 1976, my parents took me to see the tall ships in New York Harbor. I was ten, and I remember very little about it other than that I went and that the ships, tall, did not...

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Mar 7, 2025 — We’re spotlighting fine writing on Ben Rivers, Errol Morris, David Lynch, Želimir Žilnik, and Laura Carreira.

Jun 17, 2015 — From a shrewd adaptation by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, Jonathan Demme fashions a visually inventive dreamscape out of an Ibsen classic.

Feb 6, 2025 — The fifth feature from an underappreciated filmmaker sees its North American premiere at MoMA.

Jan 31, 2022 — Movies are about looking, and no one involved in the making of a film is more directly responsible for the frames we look at than a cinematographer, or director of photography. Together with the director, the cinematographer shapes the visual...

Oct 19, 2021 — The Academy Award–winning director remembers a formative and eye-opening encounter with Lynne Ramsay’s feature debut.