The Circle

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and critic for the New Yorker. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2024 and 2025. His 2024 debut novel, Great Expectations, was a finalist for the National Book Critics...

Dec 29, 2020 — Alongside the traditional top tens, critics are offering imaginative pairings and lists of the best audiovisual essays and title sequences of the year.

Jun 26, 2019 — Boasting the longest, most versatile career of any Czechoslovak New Waver, the late master made films mixed with deep compassion and an antiauthoritarian spirit.

Apr 7, 2023 — Along with the new Cinema Scope, we’re reading Raúl Ruiz’s diaries and conversations with Agnès Godard and Gregg Araki.

Nov 29, 2021 — The composer and lyricist who reinvented the American musical was “more of a film buff than a theater buff.”

Jun 10, 2019 — The new issue focuses on the impact of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, women’s film criticism, and Hollywood’s international productions.

May 18, 2017 — “Like a Judd Apatow thriller or a Michael Haneke kids flick, the concept of a Claire Denis comedy at first sounds like a contradiction in terms,” begins Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “After all, the 71-year-old French auteur, whose...

Mar 22, 2017 — A tragedian at heart, Shirley Stoler found her Medea in the role of a glowering bandit on the run in Leonard Kastle’s seedy true-crime drama.

Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...

Jan 27, 2021 — A film that centers on a transgender person or storyline enters the culture like any other movie. The difference lies in the discourse around it. A pervasive disregard for the realities of trans experience beyond the screen is evident in...