The Woman in the Room

Mar 13, 2025 — While a film’s stars are forced to bear the responsibility of moving a narrative forward, supporting actors get to have fun providing comic relief or suggesting whole lives being lived beyond the screen.

Oct 17, 2024 — Featuring a Robert Kramer retrospective, this year’s Viennale opens with Leos Carax and closes with Mati Diop.

Oct 8, 2024 — Though it received dismissive reviews upon its release, this chillingly nihilistic horror film has since influenced such masters as Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Rivette with its low-budget evocation of anxiety and indeterminacy.

Feb 8, 2022 — A Prohibition-era gangster saga, the Coen brothers’ third feature is an enigmatic fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease.

Jul 22, 2021 — Quentin Tarantino’s first novel and studies of Ophuls and Melville are among this month’s new and noteworthy titles.

Nov 26, 2019 — In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte...

Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...

Feb 20, 2018 — In this wildly inventive revenge drama, director Kon Ichikawa blurs the line between stage and screen, infusing kabuki traditions with his own extravagant visual sensibility.

Feb 12, 2018 — In “Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?,” a four-part essay at Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton first stakes out a position. Referring to one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous pieces, he writes: “For a hundred years now it’s been...

Jan 9, 2018 — Before we take another look back at the best (and today, the worst) of 2017, let’s note that, for Grasshopper Film, Radu Jude (Aferim!, Scarred Hearts) has listed, in chronological order, his eleven favorite films of the past ten years....