The Double Steps

Apr 15, 2018 — La Semaine de la Critique, or Critics’ Week, has announced the lineup for its fifty-seventh edition, running from May 9 through 17 in Cannes. The opening film will be Paul Dano’s Wildlife, and I gathered a first round of reviews...

Sep 26, 2017 — Let’s start today’s round with a few books. Next month sees the release of Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Dave Kehr’s followup to his 2011 book, When Movies Mattered. Before he became a curator in the...

Sep 4, 2017 — “Lebanon director Samuel Maoz went in a risky direction by making a film as different and daring as Foxtrot,” writes Jay Weissberg for Variety, “and his boldness pays off in ways that make one reach for superlatives. Not content to...

Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.

May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.

May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.

Apr 27, 2026 — During the evening rush on a busy Los Angeles boulevard, a man steps into a news-vendor’s stall and scans the out-of-town papers section, where journals offer balm for homesick travelers and transplants. But his hometown, Evanston, Illinois, is missing—no call...

Nov 21, 2023 — The decades have flown by, but Mean Streets (1973) has not become the least bit dated, even though we know how the careers of all the principals have evolved in the years since, not to mention that the world just...

Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...

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...