A Man’s Life

Dec 15, 2020 — One day in the late 1990s, when I was a young staff member at an art and media magazine, my boss asked me to interview an esteemed creative director of an ad agency. A few months earlier, that same magazine...

Jul 3, 2020 — As The War of the Worlds is essentially a cautionary tale, each generation gets its own adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic account of extraterrestrial invasion—one of the several seminal science-fiction novels, also including The Time Machine (1895) and The...

Jul 10, 2018 — The martial-arts film was never the same after King Hu got his hands on it, reinventing the genre with subtle editing and dazzling choreography.

Jan 24, 2018 — We begin with Rolling Stone’s David Fear: “Pick any random song by the Coup—we suggest ‘Fat Cats, Bigga Fish’ from their 1994 album Genocide & Juice, or ‘My Favorite Mutiny’ from 2006’s Pick a Bigger Weapon—and you'll get complex anti-corporate...

May 21, 2017 — “Arguably, more question marks hung over the prospect of Redoubtable than over any other film in Cannes this year,” begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. “One reason was the idea of Michel Hazanavicius, director of the world-beating The Artist, seeming too...

Mar 4, 2016 — Over the past half century, production designer Jack Fisk has created some of cinema’s most memorable on-screen worlds—from the farmlands of early-twentieth-century Texas to the byways of contemporary Los Angeles.

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Nov 3, 2013 — The legendary Italian director discusses La notte’s inspirations and themes in this 1961 newspaper article that coincided with the film’s French release.

Jun 14, 2011 —   The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets   The year is 1954: a fabulous bit of film history is about to unfurl. Grips are...

Jun 22, 2010 — In the autumn of 1989, the Iranian magazine Sorush printed a story about an unusual crime: a poor man had been arrested for impersonating a celebrated film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a middle-class family in northern Tehran. Although the accused,...