The Tale

Dec 3, 2020 — First Person A dedicated movie buff from my teenage years onward, and an assiduous if not pedantic completist forever seeking out obscure backlist items by favorite auteurs, such as that rare screening of George Cukor’s The Model and the Marriage...

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

Nov 26, 2019 — Bette Davis gets the first laugh in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), and a little over two hours later, she gets the last laugh too. The film opens at the dinner for something called the Sarah Siddons Award...

Feb 4, 2019 — Performances The first movie that Nicolas Roeg and Theresa Russell made together, Bad Timing (1980), was denounced by its distributor, the Rank Organisation, as a “sick film made by sick people for sick people,” which may sound to some like...

Dec 13, 2018 — Repertory Picks Tomorrow, as part of the opening night of the three-week-long retrospective Jacques Tourneur, Fearmaker, New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center will scare up a screening of the director’s masterpiece Cat People. The chilling tale of a fashion designer...

Jan 19, 2017 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.

Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.

Feb 4, 2016 — Repertory PicksLast month, the International House Philadelphia, in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania, kicked off a series called Cinema, Censorship, and the Scandal of Sex, selecting four films that “have been seen as an outrage to decency, morality, religious...

Sep 13, 2013 — Did You See This?• John Bailey on game-changing movie cameras • Venice love from Claire Denis, Abbas Kiarostami, and sixty-eight others • John Le Carré takes on the world. • The tragic tale of Citizen Kane’s Dorothy Comingore • The...

Nov 13, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...