The Perfect Fishplate

Oct 22, 2021 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. Americans have long been encouraged to buy into the...

Sep 22, 2021 — No one’s claiming that Cry Macho is a great movie, but plenty are moved to reflect on what Eastwood has meant to us over all these years.

Jul 7, 2021 — In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai—or the global art-house phenomenon they generated—without these extraordinary performers;...

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...

May 21, 2018 — W hether she’s pushing herself to new heights on stage and screen or nurturing her passions as a painter and poet, Juliette Binoche is as creatively voracious now as she’s ever been. Her combination of strength and disarming vulnerability as...

May 6, 2018 — Cannes 2018 One of the major highlights of the ongoing, year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman will be the presentation of a 4K restoration of The Seventh Seal (1957) as part of this year’s...

Mar 27, 2018 — At the height of his career, Ken Russell brought D. H. Lawrence’s classic exploration of human sexuality to the screen with frank eroticism and visual panache.

Feb 14, 2018 — Until the Oscars are presented on March 4, it’s not yet too late to be looking back at the best of 2017. The Village Voice has polled over a hundred critics, and Phantom Thread has come out on top with...

Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...