It Wasn’t Love

Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...

Jul 28, 2020 — Having won the hearts of audiences and costars, one of the brightest lights of Hollywood’s golden age also scored a landmark victory in the courts.

Jun 15, 2020 — This month we’re looking at books on topics ranging from Japanese animation to Hollywood movie stars to jazz on the big screen.

Jun 9, 2020 — A couple walk down a cacophonous street in New York. They’re bundled in coats—wrapped up in their own worlds. She is incandescent with joy, talking about her cadre of close friends and their regular meetings. He wears a resigned face,...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Mar 31, 2020 — Everybody loves Show Boat, but where is the love for the woman whose name alone sits above the title in James Whale’s dazzling 1936 film version? Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist for decades, and in her peak years also...

Mar 18, 2020 — People talk a lot about the way that Rita Hayworth looked. She was the Hollywood “love goddess,” with a sensational figure, a dazzling smile, and hair that fell in long, auburn waves. The pinup so iconic that her posters were...

Feb 21, 2020 — Songbook “In an instant, I remembered everything.” The Cure, “The Walk” It’s the mid-1980s, and a student in a black leather jacket walks down the hall of Polytechnic of North London. Her hair is dyed a shocking orange, maybe to...

Jan 7, 2020 — Understudies everywhere should take heart at the tale of Katharine Hepburn’s long history with the role of Linda Seton, the high-spirited but reclusive heiress she plays in George Cukor’s 1938 Holiday. When the Philip Barry play the film is based...

Nov 12, 2019 — Thai filmmaker Sorayos Prapapan’s Death of the Sound Man begins with a black screen accompanied by the mysterious but unmistakably sexual sound of someone slurping. Shortly after, the first shot reveals a young man in a sound booth fellating a...