The Hand

Jul 30, 2021 — First: conscious neglect and budget cuts are threatening cinema’s legacy. Then: this week’s highlights.

Jul 22, 2021 — Quentin Tarantino’s first novel and studies of Ophuls and Melville are among this month’s new and noteworthy titles.

May 21, 2021 — On our minds this week: John Schlesinger, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, and David Cronenberg.

Feb 9, 2021 — What does parallax mean? It is a term that English speakers are perpetually learning and always forgetting. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses: “Parallax. I never exactly understood . . . Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” In the technical sense, the word...

Jan 29, 2021 — This week sees a new publication, a revived column, and countless hours of conversations about movies.

Jan 16, 2021 — Pedro Reyes is a Mexican artist of international renown whose conceptual, often sculptural works make use of unusual materials to imagine a better, more playful world. Over the course of his two-decade-plus career, he has married a keen social conscience with an innovative approach to solving social problems: his hands...

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

Aug 18, 2020 — A sensuous exploration of amorous discontent and dreadful miscalculation, The Comfort of Strangers (1990) could be described as an erotic thriller, though it rarely is: its eroticism is too perverse, its pedigree too highbrow. Directed by Paul Schrader and based...

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Jan 31, 2020 — This week: Scorsese’s actresses, Paul Schrader’s plans, Lynne Sachs on Godard, Ritwik Ghatak’s rising reputation, and Bong Joon-ho everywhere.