The Day I Became a Woman

Dec 22, 2025 — The critic and curator talks about working on a program of films by trailblazing Black women directors, which opened at London’s BFI Southbank this year and is now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Jun 17, 2025 — Authors address overt and covert queer cinema, the avant-garde, and AI; plus notes on new collections and entire filmographies.

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

Sep 11, 2024 — Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays a deeply frustrated woman in Leigh’s first film set in contemporary Britain since Another Year (2010).

Jan 17, 2023 — Despite her initial reluctance and a stifling contract with Howard Hughes, La Lollo became one of the top stars of the 1950s and ’60s.

Sep 8, 2022 — All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is the only nonfiction film competing in Venice—and Werner Herzog and Mark Cousins remain as busy as ever.

May 7, 2021 — This week we celebrate Elaine May, Ulrike Ottinger, Liza Minnelli, and Madonna while paging through the new Senses of Cinema.

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...

Dec 21, 2020 — This month we’re reading David Bordwell on the Massive Auteur Monograph, Rachel Kushner on Marguerite Duras, and Adam Gopnik on early animation.

Nov 18, 2018 — This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.