The Girls

Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.

Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.

May 26, 2003 — Derek Jarman’s early film epitomizes the despairing and angry mood of Britain in the mid-seventies—a country facing economic recession, virtual war with the IRA, and an uncertain post-imperial future.

Nov 8, 1999 — The virgin of Orleans and those matters that surrounded her death began to interest me when the shepherd girl’s canonization in 1920* once again drew the attention of the public-at-large to the events and actions involving her—and not only in...

Aug 24, 1989 — Yasujiro Ozu’s favorite theme of the stresses and strains of parent-child relationships figure prominently in this story of a raggle-taggle theater troupe giving its final performances in a small fishing village.

Mar 8, 2021 — “I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant...

Dec 15, 2020 — One day in the late 1990s, when I was a young staff member at an art and media magazine, my boss asked me to interview an esteemed creative director of an ad agency. A few months earlier, that same magazine...

Apr 14, 2020 — Whether or not you believe it is the greatest year of all for the Hollywood studio system, the wonder of 1939 is the sheer depth of its bench. On a ten-movie best-picture ballot, the Oscars found no room to nominate...