The Short Game

May 1, 2024 — Films by Horace Ové, Menelik Shabazz, John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, and more depict Black lives in a tumultuous era.

Nov 22, 2022 — Spike Lee’s transcendent portrait of an American hero is an urgent call for the nation to live up to everything it claims to be.

Jan 12, 2022 — Gifted with the looks and suavity of a young Elvis, the “Wicked Game” crooner shares with David Lynch an obsession with 1950s Americana—and a knowledge of the darkness at its heart.

Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.

May 8, 2019 — Songbook “The very first time I saw a picture of [Charles Starkweather], I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of what America might...

Mar 1, 2018 — This year’s edition of the True/False Film Fest opens today in Columbia, Missouri and runs through Sunday. “The festival focuses on nonfiction films, though True/False’s definition of the term is intentionally porous,” writes Aarik Danielsen during the course of his...

Jan 29, 2018 — This weekend was about the Grammys, of course, but it wasn’t all about the Grammys. As Guy Lodge reports for Variety, Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri “may be proving the most critically divisive of this year’s top Oscar...

Dec 8, 2017 — “We live in an age in which articles are written daily on the need for ‘checking out’ of online culture, so that we may disconnect from the bombardment of grotesqueries that keep us in an emotional tailspin,” writes Chuck Bowen,...

Nov 9, 2017 — This year’s AFI Fest opens tonight in Los Angeles with Dee Rees’s Mudbound and was to have closed on November 16 with Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World—until Sony Pictures pulled it from the lineup in the wake...

Sep 21, 2017 — It’s #StephenKingDay. The author of fifty-four novels, most of them bestsellers, six works of nonfiction, including the widely revered memoir On Writing (2000), and nearly 200 short stories turns seventy today. “The ‘King of Horror’ has sold an estimated 350...