His Mother’s Son

Dec 13, 2022 — A pioneering feminist artist drawn to universal themes, the Swedish director mined the complexity and humor of human behavior in films that courted controversy and cultivated a sense of detachment.

Aug 16, 2022 — The Safdie brothers drew inspiration from their childhood memories for their first feature as codirectors, a terrifying yet wondrous portrait of an unpredictable father.

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

Aug 31, 2021 — Cary Joji Fukunaga’s devastating child-soldier movie unflinchingly captures the shock of war without forsaking the complexity of human experience.

Jun 28, 2021 — Next month brings a twenty-seven-film spotlight on the neonoir thrillers of the post-studio-system era, a survey of art-house animation from around the world, and more.

Jun 15, 2021 — These landmark documentary portraits of intergenerational struggle in Seattle expose social horrors while also revealing the humanity of their subjects.

Nov 19, 2020 — This month, we’re sorting through new books featuring—for starters—Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras, Billy Wilder, Geraldine Chaplin, and Harmony Korine.

Mar 31, 2020 — Everybody loves Show Boat, but where is the love for the woman whose name alone sits above the title in James Whale’s dazzling 1936 film version? Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist for decades, and in her peak years also...

Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...

Sep 13, 2018 — The imitation of nature becomes a devotional act in Terrence Malick’s cinema, which reaches sublime heights in this exploration of childhood, memory, and grief.