The Test

Mar 17, 2025 — Headlining this month’s roundup are Joan Didion, Merle Oberon, and Charlie Chaplin.

Sep 27, 2022 — Darius Marder’s Oscar-nominated drama captures the isolation and despair of a man who suddenly goes deaf and struggles in vain to regain his former life.

Jan 8, 2013 — In Monte Hellman’s hypnotic road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, folk singer James Taylor gives a lead performance that is both unassuming and arresting, the kind of askew, unshowy, vanity-free acting that perhaps only a nonprofessional actor is capable of. As the...

Apr 12, 2016 — Howard Hawks’s 1939 aviation classic Only Angels Have Wings is an exemplar of the auteurist Hollywood entertainer’s capability to fuse “a personal existential statement and a delightful piece of showmanship.”

Jan 31, 2014 — Did You See This?• Naked Lunch and other adaptations of the unadaptable • David Bordwell on the great critics of yore • The Hitchcock-Nabokov collaboration that never was • A pas de deux from Chantal Akerman and Pina Bausch •...

Nov 8, 2013 — Did You See This?• Time out with Richard Linklater in a new video essay. • J. Hoberman on high art • Sketching Persona • Alain Delon and Robert Evans, men about town • Jan N?mec talks movies and music. •...

Sep 26, 2013 — Roberto Rossellini officially left neorealism behind with his modern masterpiece, an intimate tale of marriage on the rocks.

May 17, 2004 — Banned by the Third Reich before it was even released, Fritz Lang’s denunciation of Nazi Germany is a compellingly contemporary image of terrorism in an age of universal conspiracy and advanced technology.

Sep 3, 2025 — Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee), Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone (Bugonia), and Dwyane Johnson (The Smashing Machine) dazzle in Venice.

The filmmaker shares how The Testament of Dr. Mabuse influenced The Dark Knight, talks about the importance of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, and praises the way David Lynch evokes dream logic on-screen.