The Heart of a Nation

Jun 19, 2018 — It keeps happening. At the time of this writing, students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are mourning the deaths of fourteen of their classmates and three faculty members, all of whom a nineteen-year-old is accused of...

Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...

Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....

Sep 29, 2025 — Notes on new studies of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick and biographies of Jane Birkin and Terrence Malick.

Mar 13, 2020 — Maybe in tough times we can draw strength from our passion for great cinema.

Mar 24, 2025 — At the turn of the millennium, a loose collective of filmmakers—including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg—made a splash with a provocative manifesto and a wave of audacious movies shot on digital video.

Jun 25, 2024 — Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

Jan 8, 2024 — The National Society of Film Critics and the Golden Globes have us surveying the latest round of best-of-2023 lists and overviews.

Nov 16, 2020 — The renowned Bengali actor, playwright, and poet will be remembered first and foremost for his work with Satyajit Ray.

Oct 18, 2019 — An intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Errol Morris’s body of work: while his films are driven by a relentless pursuit of knowledge and facts, they ultimately reveal cinema’s inability to capture a definitive version of reality. It’s this...