The Work

Aug 20, 2015 — You may recognize Jason Polan’s often wacky, always charming drawings from our newsletter emails. But the artist, whose illustrations have also been published in the New Yorker, Metropolis, and the New York Times, has his sights set on more than...

Jan 6, 2014 — Critics commonly describe Throne of Blood (1957) as Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth. While this description is certainly not untrue, the film is much more than a direct cinematic translation of a literary text. Kurosawa’s movie is a brilliant synthesis...

Jul 19, 2012 — I want to start with my favorite story about Carole Lombard. She began her career in Hollywood in her teens and, as we know, was very attractive. She found herself hounded by the wolves of Tinseltown but came up with...

Jun 1, 2012 — Though his career was devastatingly brief, Jean Vigo was able to leave behind many unforgettable images that have joined the cinematic pantheon. One of them is undoubtedly Zéro de conduite’s boarding-school insurrectionists in pajamas, whooping it up in slow motion...

Jun 21, 2010 — A new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. —Michelangelo Antonioni Red Desert came out in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of the war,...

Mar 25, 2009 — J.Hoberman’s got a sharp and snazzy piece in the New York Times on American expat director Jules Dassin—just in time for Film Forum’s fifteen-film retrospective of his career. The blacklisted filmmaker of black-hearted crime dramas (and a couple of hot-blooded...

Stephanie LaCava is a writer based in New York City. She is the founder of Small Press, an independent publisher of works in translation and artist-led narratives for children. Her novel The Superrationals will come out next year from Semiotext(e).

Jan 15, 2025 — Edward Berger’s improbably entertaining follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) scores twelve.

Jul 16, 2013 — Theater legend Peter Brook’s approach to bringing the classic fable about human savagery to the screen was radical in its straightforwardness.

Jul 15, 1991 — For only his second studio film, Peter Bogdanovich chanced directing an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s elegiac novel about teenagers who come of age in a dying Texas town in the early fifties.