The Last Stage

Feb 4, 2021 — Here’s an overview of what critics have been saying about this year’s winners.

Jan 29, 2021 — This week sees a new publication, a revived column, and countless hours of conversations about movies.

Dec 4, 2020 — Forty years after her death, people still imitate Mae West’s voice: that slinky contralto drawl that hit each Brooklyn-inflected vowel like a cab driver leaning on his horn. The voice would be memorable even if she had by some wild...

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Nov 13, 2020 — We’re keeping busy with online festivals, awards nominations, remembrances, and plenty of weekend reading.

Aug 24, 2020 — “Temporal pincers” aside, this two-and-a-half-hour puzzler may be easier to follow than you might expect.

Aug 21, 2020 — A free film school in a French banlieue, a nineteenth-century inventor, and a lesbian classic are among this week’s highlights.

Aug 10, 2020 — A slyly feminist film by the only woman directing in the Hollywood studio system of her thirties-and-early-forties heyday, Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance stands as one of the era’s most groundbreaking—and entertaining—backstage sagas. And as it turned out, a different...

Jun 30, 2020 — Come and See (1985) is one of those films whose authority is established from its opening moments. Out in the open air, an elderly peasant dressed in a soft-peaked beret is volleying a mixture of threats and imprecations into some...

Jun 23, 2020 — Late in Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa’s thrillingly anomalous record of the 1964 Olympic Summer Games, the film documents one of the most taxing contests, the individual modern pentathlon, in a startling montage of still photographs, accompanied by stark sound effects....