She and He

Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...

Aug 3, 2020 — Songbook “You’ve probably heard that one before, but what the hell. If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.” first spoken dialogue in Inside Llewyn Davis The coldest murder in the Coen Brothers...

Feb 24, 2020 — “Look, Rose, find someone who isn’t sick. The ground’s covered with them.” Kirk Douglas in The Story of Three Loves Kirk Douglas’s casual mode is a look of anguished alertness. He has as an inbuilt ability to register tension, anxiety,...

Dec 11, 2019 — One Scene “Who can prove the genuineness of our feelings?” a character asks at one point in the Cannes-award-winning sci-fi drama Little Joe, the first English-language film by Austrian director Jessica Hausner. The question is as good a summation as...

Oct 10, 2019 — Dark Passages Where the sea and the city meet, they corrupt each other. Around docks, the ocean’s margins are scummy with oil and floating garbage; the water corrodes hulls, encrusts pilings, and slimes steps. Ports cater to men who come...

May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...

Jan 12, 2018 — The sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival is just over a month away now, running from February 15 through 25, and so far, we’ve seen first rounds of titles lined up for the Competition and the Panorama, Generation, and Shorts programs—as...

Jan 2, 2018 — John Hughes created the blueprint for the American teen movie with this pop-culture phenomenon, finding the humanity in an assortment of high school archetypes.

Nov 7, 2017 — A haughty socialite is torn between the affections of three men in George Cukor’s blissful comedy of manners.

Oct 12, 2017 — Tonight, Griffin Dunne will be at the Walter Reade Theater to take part in a Q&A following a screening of the documentary he’s made about his aunt, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. The New York Film Festival will...