The Damned Thing

May 21, 2024 — The reviews are in for Caught by the Tides, Emilia Pérez, and The Substance.

Jan 28, 2021 — Deep Dives Domestic work offers both an agonizing ennui and the satisfaction of a necessary task being completed. In the 1981 documentary Clotheslines, filmmaker Roberta Cantow mines these two moods, as well as the subtler emotions that fill the distance...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Oct 15, 2019 — After breaking through in Medium Cool, Forster floundered until Quentin Tarantino plucked him from undeserved obscurity nearly thirty years later.

Jul 4, 2017 — The great character actress delivers a lusty, unbridled performance as a preacher’s daughter in this late-career gem from John Huston.

Jul 1, 2014 — The author’s recollections of the great English actor.

Feb 23, 2012 — Author John Voelker (a.k.a. Robert Traver) met musician Duke Ellington on the set of Anatomy of a Murder; he wrote this piece about the experience for the Detroit News Sunday Magazine in 1967.

Nov 26, 2024 — In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.

Apr 28, 2020 — “Fuck! Fuck you fuck me fuck old people fuck children fuck peace! Fuck peace.”Miranda July shouts at her car’s steering wheel. With a black Sharpie, she scrawls FUCK in huge letters on the inside of her windshield. She drives. Sunlight...

Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.