Half a Confession

Apr 20, 2021 — 1. “I Felt Nothing” In September 2019, about halfway between claiming the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and earning multiple Oscar nominations in January 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite was briefly upstaged by a movie from the director’s past....

Dec 23, 2017 — Let’s first take a quick break from 2017 and look back fifty years (as I suspect we’ll be doing a lot in 2018). For Little White Lies, Justine Smith has been rifling through various archives and has put together a...

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Oct 8, 2024 — An otherworldly exploration of the realm between life and death, this horror masterpiece transcends its genre with its poetic, often unsettling use of fragmentation and discontinuity.

May 31, 2022 — Billy Wilder’s classic film noir is a powerful meditation on masculinity, desire, and the fantasies of white America.

Oct 2, 2014 — People struggle to escape their socially dictated roles in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s moving, Douglas Sirk–inspired melodrama.

Jan 13, 2023 — This week’s eclectic round touches on experimental milestones, restorations, Mexican cinema, a Japanese series, and movies about movies.

Mar 24, 2026 — In this true-crime epic, Martin Scorsese combines his career-long exploration of amoral gangsterism with a sobering meditation on what it means to live on American soil.

Jul 22, 2025 — An era-defining reckoning with the sexual revolution, Mike Nichols’s controversial drama develops a rigorous form for analyzing what we have recently come to call “toxic masculinity.”

Nov 6, 2020 — A new restoration of Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, the return of Sophia Loren, supercops in the 1970s, and Costa-Gavras’s Z are on our minds this week.