In a Better World

Apr 15, 2022 — This week we’re reading interviews with Mira Nair and Jane Schoenbrun, profiles of Viola Davis and Maggie Cheung, and an essay on Joan Micklin Silver.

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...

Feb 9, 2021 — What does parallax mean? It is a term that English speakers are perpetually learning and always forgetting. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses: “Parallax. I never exactly understood . . . Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” In the technical sense, the word...

Dec 4, 2020 — Forty years after her death, people still imitate Mae West’s voice: that slinky contralto drawl that hit each Brooklyn-inflected vowel like a cab driver leaning on his horn. The voice would be memorable even if she had by some wild...

Oct 7, 2020 — The NYFF’s program of five short works is currently screening virtually through Saturday.

Jul 15, 2020 — When I first saw The Lady Eve (1941), in my teens, I was certain I had never seen a comedy more perfectly constructed, a judgment that the subsequent decades have not revised. I had also seen none more acutely witty,...

Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...

May 14, 2019 — It all comes down to that first wink. About half an hour through Michael Haneke’s 1997 cause célèbre Funny Games, Paul (Arno Frisch), one of the two politely psychotic young home invaders who’ve taken a family captive, leads one of his...

Apr 5, 2018 — “Just a few years in and DOC10 is already a must-hit stop on the festival circuit for the year’s best documentaries,” writes Lisa Trifone in the Third Coast Review. “The brainchild of Chicago Media Project and head programmer Anthony Kaufman,...

Feb 27, 2018 — Director Tony Richardson refracts the bawdy spirit of the 1960s through this brilliantly distilled take on an eighteenth-century picaresque.