The Butler

Isaac Butler is the author of The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act and coauthor, with Dan Kois, of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of “Angels in America.”

Jan 16, 2025 — Swoon for big-city romance with our New York Love Stories collection; celebrate Black history with stories of community, creativity, and resistance; or tango with the shady characters of Argentina’s noir thrillers.

Jul 27, 2021 — The directors of Zola and Time will direct adaptations of novels by the acclaimed science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.

Aug 28, 2020 — This week’s highlights feature paintings brought to life, pioneering citizen journalists, early “race films,” and the first Japanese wave.

Feb 13, 2018 — With the scrappiest of means, George A. Romero created not only a landmark of independent cinema but also an indelible portrait of America as hellscape.

Feb 3, 2009 — Luis Buñuel’s surrealist satire is the last film he made in Mexico, the last one in which he used Mexican actors, and most significantly the last one on which he worked with the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.

Jul 25, 2024 — During a tumultuous period in New York’s history, movies like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and Shaft found excitement and squalor in one of the city’s most infamous tourist attractions.

Jul 22, 2022 — Films by Jordon Peele, Ethan Hawke, and Lucile Hadžihalilović arrive along with a series tracing the path of the Method.

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Sep 20, 2018 — The sheer strangeness of wealth and class divisions is fodder for screwball hilarity in Gregory La Cava’s Depression-era masterpiece.