American Me

Aug 20, 2021 — The author of Velvet Was the Night pays tribute to the shockingly stripped-down, dread-inducing use of silence in Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful neonoir.

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.

Aug 17, 2021 — This month we’re reading about Hollywood memoirs, cultural histories, and the revived debate over the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad.

Aug 10, 2021 — Hirokazu Kore-eda’s international breakthrough is a bittersweet meditation on mortality, memory, and the movies.

Aug 6, 2021 — At a perilous moment in the history of the western, a series of films by Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott stood out for their no-nonsense lucidity.

Aug 2, 2021 — Here’s what’s next for Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Dominga Sotomayor, plus updates on forthcoming films from Jean-Luc Godard and Claire Denis.

Jul 22, 2021 — Quentin Tarantino’s first novel and studies of Ophuls and Melville are among this month’s new and noteworthy titles.

Jul 19, 2021 — When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously...

Jul 13, 2021 — Critics assess new work from Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Paul Verhoeven, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, François Ozon, Joachim Trier, and more.