The Look

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

May 26, 2026 — Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female...

Mar 28, 2023 — Described by director Joan Micklin Silver as “a kind of weird romantic comedy,” this defiantly ambiguous exploration of amour fou presents its obsessive antihero in all his contradictions.

Sep 28, 2022 — Cameroonian director Dikongué-Pipa’s debut feature is both a manifesto on cinema’s capacity to bring about social change and a celebration of love and its possibilities.

Jul 9, 2019 — Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film Europa Europa recounts the incredible but true story of how Salomon Perel, born in 1925 in Germany to a Polish Jewish family, survived the Holocaust by posing as a pure Aryan German raised in Poland. Recruited...

Feb 14, 2019 — Repertory Picks This Friday, critic Girish Shambu will present Aki Kaurismäki’s warmhearted fable Le Havre (2011) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. The first entry in an ongoing trilogy about the plight of refugees in twenty-first-century Europe, the film is set...

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.

Dec 20, 2013 — Did You See This?• Farran Smith Nehme on Joan Fontaine • David Thomson on Peter O’Toole • The Great Beauty deserves the award for best-dressed. • Liv Ullmann looks back. • Twenty-five new ones for the National Film Registry •...

Nov 18, 2009 — Wes Anderson’s surprising latest endeavor, the stop-motion Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox, is out in theaters now and garnering terrific reviews. We thought we’d catch up with our friend and ask him some questions about this charming labor of love,...