The Kid

Jun 11, 2019 — In the mid-1970s, a poet’s circus rolled through the northeast, manifesting the spirit and confusion of the era.

Dec 28, 2017 — Every year for eleven years now, at the height of list-making season, Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, or both offer a welcome twist with an entry on the best films that have just turned ninety. This year, Thompson looks back on...

Jul 27, 2017 — Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux is one of the most unsettling comedies of its era and a brilliant showcase for his talent for mixing modes of comedic performance.

May 26, 2016 — During the conductor and composer’s visit—a day after he’d led the New York Philharmonic in a live orchestral performance of the score to City Lights—we talked about his love for early cinema, the delicate process of restoring Chaplin’s music, and...

Oct 13, 2015 — Divorce wreaks a particularly devastating form of havoc in David Cronenberg's personal take on the dissolution of a marriage.

May 7, 2015 — Movie comedies about moviemaking through the decades

Nov 11, 2013 — A boldly silent film in the talkie era, Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece has a grace that has never been equaled.

Feb 11, 2013 — The movies of the Belgian filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are at once studies in propulsive forward motion and moral tales that plumb the depths of their troubled characters with jittery concern. In works like La promesse, Rosetta, and...

Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...

Nov 26, 2010 — Early in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, as the wind from the Texas plains whips the small town of Anarene, the high-school senior Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) halts his recalcitrant pickup truck—Hank Williams is warbling “Why Don’t You Love...