The Passage

Nov 11, 2019 — This month we’re reading about the women (and men) of Hollywood, weighing arguments from all corners, and picking up an overlooked novel.

Aug 6, 2019 — The groundbreaking filmmaker had a hand in inventing—and then reinventing over and again—the modern documentary.

Jan 25, 2023 — Critical favorites include new films by Ira Sachs, Roger Ross Williams, William Oldroyd, and Raine Allen-Miller.

Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...

Jun 6, 2018 — Anatomy of a Gag In many of his best-known incarnations, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp is a lonely figure, looking for adventure, romance, and security in a chaotic world. But for his wildly successful 1921 film The Kid, Chaplin gave his...

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Sep 26, 2017 — Let’s start today’s round with a few books. Next month sees the release of Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Dave Kehr’s followup to his 2011 book, When Movies Mattered. Before he became a curator in the...

Apr 25, 2005 — In Andrzej Wajda’s masterful antiwar film, we see scarcely a single combat death, yet the dark radiance of doom haloes one and all.

Jun 23, 2003 — Alain Resnais’s antidocumentary never purports to “document” the heinous realities of the Holocaust; instead, it interrogates our responses.

Mar 9, 2021 — “Oral tradition is a tradition of images. What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in direct...