Show Me Love

Nov 26, 2019 — In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte...

Nov 12, 2019 — Thai filmmaker Sorayos Prapapan’s Death of the Sound Man begins with a black screen accompanied by the mysterious but unmistakably sexual sound of someone slurping. Shortly after, the first shot reveals a young man in a sound booth fellating a...

Nov 7, 2019 — Two of the most spellbinding scenes in any Hollywood movie: In the first, Judy Garland, bedecked in a cinched, blue-and-white-striped dress, and topped with a long, auburn wig, sings of her longing for “the boy next door,” her adorable, ginger-peachy...

Oct 15, 2019 — After breaking through in Medium Cool, Forster floundered until Quentin Tarantino plucked him from undeserved obscurity nearly thirty years later.

Oct 10, 2019 — Dark Passages Where the sea and the city meet, they corrupt each other. Around docks, the ocean’s margins are scummy with oil and floating garbage; the water corrodes hulls, encrusts pilings, and slimes steps. Ports cater to men who come...

Oct 4, 2019 — When I met Ann Carter in 2007 during the filming of a documentary about Hollywood producer Val Lewton, she was seventy years old, more than six decades removed from her starring role in Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People....

Sep 13, 2019 — Nicholas Britell’s scores are so finely calibrated to the movies they inhabit that they become inextricable from the images on-screen. Whether it’s the staccato heartbeat of orchestral strings in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight or the mix of piano motifs and hip-hop...

Aug 6, 2019 — The groundbreaking filmmaker had a hand in inventing—and then reinventing over and again—the modern documentary.

Jul 16, 2019 — When Alan J. Pakula began preparing for the production of Klute (1971), he screened a lot of Alfred Hitchcock films. He looked at Notorious and admired Ingrid Bergman’s work. He revisited Strangers on a Train, struggling with the climactic merry-go-round...

Jul 2, 2019 — Father-child relationships come into focus in this week’s Short and Feature pairing on the Criterion Channel, which examines the trauma of coming of age with an emotionally unstable parent. Presented with Víctor Erice’s El Sur, Charles Williams’s All These Creatures follows...