The Big Cat

Jan 17, 2024 — Steven Soderbergh contemplates writing his first novel, while Keanu Reeves already has; plus notes on Barbara Stanwyck, noir, and more.

Aug 11, 2023 — Back in the early 1980s, people were still trying to figure hip-hop out.Now in its fiftieth year, this cultural movement built by DJs, rappers, break dancers, and graffiti writers began in New York, spreading from the South Bronx to the...

Aug 10, 2023 — “You’re the company I waited so long for,” Dr. Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) says to her three Self Replicating Automatons in Teknolust (2002), artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s sci-fi farce about a scientist’s well-meaning pursuit of artificial life. Stone’s color-coded clones...

Jul 25, 2023 — Venice packs more than a few surprises, and Toronto’s announced sixty Gala and Special Presentations.

Jul 10, 2023 — Writer-archivist-filmmaker Jenni Olson and critic Caden Mark Gardner discuss Masc, a collection of films on the Criterion Channel that explores the many forms of masculinity beyond the realm of cisgender men.

Dec 12, 2022 — The great but underrated Hollywood star Irene Dunne made her transition to screwball comedy by playing the scandal-courting author at the heart of Theodora Goes Wild.

May 20, 2022 — Critics take a first look at new films from James Gray, Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, Mia Hansen-Løve, Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, and Pietro Marcello.

May 10, 2022 — Joseph Losey’s sumptuous portrait of Nazi-occupied Paris sees an icy Alain Delon as an art dealer on a Kafkaesque quest for identity.

Mar 15, 2022 — The story of queerness in American cinema isn’t complete without the unusual case of These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961). Both films are based on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, inspired by an incident in which...

Feb 4, 2022 — This week: Céline Sciamma, Julia Ducournau, Jane Campion, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve.