The Failure

Oct 5, 2017 — “When you make a movie called Spielberg,” begins Mike Hale in the New York Times, “and its subject agrees to sit for what turns out to be thirty hours of interviews—and his sisters sit down with you, as do his...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Noah Baumbach has always been a writer-director of no formal distinction, but he's possessed with a keen eye and ear for the intricacies of pettiness, humiliation, and schadenfreude,” begins Steve Macfarlane at Slant. “His new film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New...

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Sep 17, 2009 — Director René Clément had conveyed the darker aspects of human nature in 1952’s heartbreaking Forbidden Games, which became an international, award-winning hit despite the rawness and melancholy of its antiwar message. The bitter irony and willingness to grapple with the...

Aug 20, 2024 — In the late 1980s, filmmakers Gregorio Rocha and Sarah Minter set out to capture the rebellious subculture of youth in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a slumlike suburb synonymous with the worst failures of urban expansion in Mexico.

Jul 27, 2026 — Some read Thomson’s new book as an attack on cinema; others argue that they’re missing the point.

Mar 25, 2015 — Errol Morris’s revolutionary film boldly investigated the truth of a murder case while reimagining documentary cinema aesthetics.

Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.

Aug 12, 2025 — This remarkably sensitive yet jarringly violent romance epitomizes director Youssef Chahine’s late-fifties hybrid style, which combined elements of Hollywood entertainment with an unmistakably Egyptian spirit.

Aug 28, 2023 — Throughout her four-decade career as a writer and director, Susan Seidelman has told complex stories about unconventional women striving to express themselves and maintain their autonomy. Her genre-melding films fuse a passion for the pleasures of Hollywood spectacle with a...