The Key

Apr 11, 2022 — Whit Stillman pays tribute to illustrator Pierre Le-Tan and Genevieve Yue, Gary Indiana, and Dennis Lim discuss their new books.

Feb 22, 2022 — Acting, that undefinable amalgam of technique, persona, and plain hard work, dominates this month’s roundup.

Jul 30, 2021 — First: conscious neglect and budget cuts are threatening cinema’s legacy. Then: this week’s highlights.

May 18, 2021 — The 1892 Chinese novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai opens with a prologue in which the author, Han Ziyun, writes from his own perspective, providing a gateway into the book by describing a dream he has had. Referring to himself...

Apr 8, 2021 — The London-based, British Ghanaian artist and filmmaker Larry Achiampong explores race, class, and history in a multidisciplinary practice that, as described in the biography on his website, seeks to “examine his communal and personal heritage—in particular, the intersection between pop...

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

Feb 5, 2020 — MoMA’s annual festival of nonfiction film and media is “eclectic by design.”

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 1, 2019 — Jonathan Glazer and Michael Mann return, Parasite fever burns on, and Paul Harrill rolls out his acclaimed second feature.