The Criminal

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Oct 24, 2017 — In this intimate psychological thriller, Olivier Assayas interrogates contemporary society’s near-religious reliance on technology and its mediation of reality.

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Nov 8, 2022 — In her first film that places a male character front and center, Jane Campion trains her unsparing gaze on the brutality of patriarchal power and the pain of repressed homoerotic desire.

Apr 24, 2006 — This influential crime thriller, designed purely as a genre exercise, is the first in the long series of anomalies that was Louis Malle’s career.

Nov 18, 2022 — Nikyatu Jusu, Douglas Sirk, Mike De Leon, Donald Sutherland, and Sam Raimi are on our minds this week.

Sep 22, 2022 — This month we’re reading about Jean-Luc Godard, Dirk Bogarde, Michael K. Williams, a few new novels, and just the state of things in general.

Dec 4, 2024 — Before she won acclaim as a pioneering director, the Hollywood icon made her name as a powerfully vivid actor who brought grit and toughness to films by such masters as Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Michael Curtiz.

Apr 2, 2021 — More mysteries from Rian Johnson plus notes on forthcoming films from Steven Spielberg, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Alma Har’el, and more.