The Silent World

Nov 30, 2021 — Lost films are not the only tragedy of the silent age. It’s time that we counted up all the forgotten stories, and the overlooked connections as well. The truth is that lost films and lost memories can’t be separated. One...

Oct 15, 2021 — There is a gloriously unaffected vibe about Gina Prince-Bythewood. Cerebral and sublime, casually beautiful and laser-focused, she has written and directed impressive television and film for the past twenty-plus years with equal parts rigor and joy. And she has achieved...

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

Aug 10, 2021 — Hirokazu Kore-eda’s international breakthrough is a bittersweet meditation on mortality, memory, and the movies.

Jul 7, 2021 — In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai—or the global art-house phenomenon they generated—without these extraordinary performers;...

Jul 6, 2021 — The fourth of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seven features is his most oneiric and resistant to interpretation, drawing from the director’s own childhood memories to create a fluid sense of history.

Jul 6, 2021 — Howard Hawks’s madcap battle of the sexes is a reminder of how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be.

Jun 17, 2021 — The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience...

May 21, 2021 — On our minds this week: John Schlesinger, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, and David Cronenberg.

May 11, 2021 — Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.