This Happy Life

Feb 14, 2023 — This month’s roundup opens with an appreciation of Preston Sturges and wraps with a book launch serving donuts and damn fine coffee.

Dec 23, 2022 — A roundup of holiday reading featuring Ingmar Bergman, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Damien Chazelle, Ernst Lubitsch, and Carolee Schneemann.

Oct 14, 2022 — Martin Scorsese remembers Jean-Luc Godard, Francine Prose admires Jafar Panahi, and Guy Maddin discusses his earliest and newest works.

Sep 30, 2022 — We’re reading interviews with Garret Bradley and Don Hertzfeldt and a marvelous account of the making of Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

Nov 24, 2021 — Mike Leigh, Hayao Miyazaki, Céline Sciamma, and Jessica Beshir discuss their work, and Farran Smith Nehme launches a newsletter.

Nov 17, 2021 — Having won major prizes in Berlin and Cannes, the director has been talking openly about his background, influences, and working methods.

Oct 20, 2021 — This uncanny tale of existential anxiety stands out as the most rigorously pared-down American science-fiction film of the 1950s.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles takes aim at Hollywood’s way of representing race in this blistering satire about a white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned Black overnight.

Sep 21, 2021 — Johnnie To pays homage to Akira Kurosawa in this martial arts drama about the virtue of struggle and self-improvement.

Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.