Something to Talk About

Feb 2, 2011 — This essay first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the author. Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was...

Sep 19, 2005 — When I was a teenage cinephile, in the mid-1970s, Masculin féminin was enormously significant to me. It repre­sented France’s nouvelle vague of the sixties, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It was in black and white and...

Apr 24, 2000 — When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming. Only the people and places of the dream matter. I have difficulty making contact with others, as one does when half-asleep. If a person is asleep...

Oct 2, 2025 — In Wes Anderson’s romantic ode to journalism, the director grapples with the danger and horror inherent in any field of endeavor worth pursuing.

Feb 19, 2025 — Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke reteam to prove once again that few can make talk livelier or more engaging.

Jul 6, 2021 — The fourth of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seven features is his most oneiric and resistant to interpretation, drawing from the director’s own childhood memories to create a fluid sense of history.

Jun 17, 2019 — Performances I can’t remember a time in my childhood when I saw a grown-up cry. It wasn’t that the elders around me were all that even-tempered; most of them were no less capable of lashing out in anger or indignation...

Sep 8, 2018 — The star of over a hundred movies wielded his laid-back charisma to conquer the box office throughout the 1970s.

Feb 26, 2015 — The threat of death hangs over Watership Down, Martin Rosen’s wise and uncompromising animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel about rabbits on a survival mission.

Jan 11, 2011 — His most personal film as well as the final one to deal with the German occupation of France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s thriller showcases human consciousness grappling with mortality.