Love is Strength

May 24, 2017 — “Sofia Coppola delivers a very enjoyable southern melodrama, the tale of a handsome, badly wounded Union soldier in enemy terrain during the American civil war who throws himself on the mercy of a ladies’ seminary—of all the outrageous things.” The...

Oct 31, 2016 — In her latest column, critic Imogen Sara Smith explores landmark moments in the intersection of noir and the western, including Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

Apr 1, 2016 — “We were different in age, but we had something in common. We were women, we had been affected by the fact that the film world was a man’s world.” In a new conversation published in Interview magazine, cinematographer Babette Mangolte...

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.

Oct 13, 2015 — Divorce wreaks a particularly devastating form of havoc in David Cronenberg's personal take on the dissolution of a marriage.

Sep 2, 2015 — We love it when great novelists write about cinema—they’re often able to capture something ineffable and magical about the form that critics may have come to take for granted. Case in point: the New York Review of Books has posted...

Jun 1, 2015 — A legionnaire turned fruit seller misses out on Germany’s economic miracle in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s breakthrough melodrama.

Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...

Mar 26, 2014 — The author recalls his encounters with the great Swedish actress.