New World

Sep 23, 2019 — Acclaimed filmmaker Rian Johnson has made a career out of retrofitting genres to his own imaginative specifications. After novel spins on the gumshoe neonoir (Brick) and the time-travel thriller (Looper), the writer-director launched into space—and won a much wider audience—with...

Sep 20, 2019 — In the winter of 1981, when I was young, I fell madly in love with a handsome poet. About two weeks into our affaire de cœur, we went to the Thalia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see...

Sep 17, 2019 — Also this month: Hollywood stars writing and reading and a novel that reimagines the intertwined lives of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl.

Sep 17, 2019 — With his last completed film, the sly, suggestive comedy of manners Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch brought to the screen one of the most irrepressible, irresistible Hollywood heroines of the forties. The niece of a plumber in a Britain on the...

Sep 13, 2019 — Nicholas Britell’s scores are so finely calibrated to the movies they inhabit that they become inextricable from the images on-screen. Whether it’s the staccato heartbeat of orchestral strings in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight or the mix of piano motifs and hip-hop...

Sep 11, 2019 — Following his landmark collection of photographs, The Americans, Frank made essential films about the Beats, the Stones, and his own personal tragedies.

Sep 10, 2019 — The comedic murder mystery in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie has scored an outstanding round of early reviews.

Sep 10, 2019 — In this landmark melodrama, director Ritwik Ghatak channeled his grief over the destruction of his beloved homeland, Bengal, in the wake of the Partition of India.

Sep 6, 2019 — This week we revisit the work of the late critic Gilberto Perez, novelist W. G. Sebald, and filmmakers Alice Guy Blaché, Wong Kar-wai, and Agnès Varda.

Sep 5, 2019 — Critics split three ways: Joker is just plain great, or great but dangerous, or dangerous and also really quite bad.