A Working Man

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

Jan 22, 2021 — Terence Davies, Joanna Hogg, Noah Baumbach, Bertrand Bonello, and Im Sang-soo have projects in the works.

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Nov 10, 2020 — The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many...

Oct 22, 2020 — 1.     Jimmy Ringo, the protagonist of the 1950 western The Gunfighter, is based on real-life nineteenth-century outlaw John Peters Ringgold, better known as Johnny Ringo. One of Tombstone, Arizona’s most notorious gunslingers, he also served as the model for the...

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

Oct 7, 2020 — One Scene I have a very precise memory of watching The Game for the first time, of sitting on the couch in the family room of my childhood home, inserting the VHS tape, and being totally taken in. At the...

Oct 1, 2020 — Few directors capture bodies in motion with the sensuous intensity that Claire Denis brings to her work. In some of the most memorable scenes in her filmography, she invites viewers to linger in moments where her characters lose themselves in...

Sep 23, 2020 — First Person 1.In the past years I’ve often walked or bicycled alone to the small multiplex in my town, on weeknights. I like sitting by myself in movie theaters—I specify “by myself” to indicate my preference for going unaccompanied, as...

Sep 16, 2020 — Glenn Kenny’s new book on Scorsese’s Goodfellas scores raves and Coppola has been tinkering with The Godfather again.