Behind the Scenes

May 23, 2019 — Our survey of this year’s edition begins with the first animated feature to take the top award.

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

May 20, 2018 — A lifelong movie collector remembers the thrill of discovering the granddaddy of all monsters on Super 8.

Nov 7, 2017 — A haughty socialite is torn between the affections of three men in George Cukor’s blissful comedy of manners.

Oct 17, 2017 — Paul Thomas Anderson’s next film—and very likely Daniel Day-Lewis’s last—now has a release date, Christmas Day, and its own website. In Phantom Thread, Anderson “will once again explore a distinctive milieu of the 20th century. The new movie is a...

Oct 11, 2017 — The shower scene in Psycho remains one of the most iconic scenes in film history. Alexandre O. Philippe, director of the new documentary 78/52,explains why it touched a nerve with audiences.

Sep 26, 2017 — The sexual pedagogy of a masochistic music instructor takes center stage in this shocking study of art, control, and repression.

Aug 26, 2017 — Alexandro Segade covers a lot of ground in his piece for Artforum on Sense8, the Netflix series created by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski which was cancelled this summer but granted one last two-hour episode for tying...

Apr 2, 2017 — What defines noir acting? In her latest Dark Passages column, Imogen Sara Smith examines the stylistic variety in some of the genre’s most iconic male performances, including Burt Lancaster in The Killers and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly.