The Way of the World

May 25, 2021 — In Edmund Goulding’s gritty cult classic, Tyrone Power casts off his matinee-idol image to play a conniving carnival barker on the flipside of the American dream.

May 5, 2021 — Deep Dives THE LIFE OF THE LANDIS PERPETUATEDIN RIGHTEOUSNESS one of the protest signs depicted (poetically, upside down) in The Sand Island Story Victoria Keith was a high school teacher, in 1976, when she heard about the pending eviction of two farming communities on Oahu’s East Shore....

Apr 22, 2021 — Monte Hellman In 1965, Monte Hellman took a cast and crew to a desert in Utah and shot two westerns back to back. With The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, Hellman introduced an existential dread and a Beckettian sense...

Apr 16, 2021 — Few motifs in Indian cinema are as potent, as laden with history and meaning, as the train. In 1955’s Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray immortalized the railways as the symbol of an alienating modernity in a newly independent India; in a...

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...

Mar 16, 2021 — In Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), play is a life force, pleasure a form of liberation. Drawing inspiration from cartoons, Hollywood musicals, and the vaudeville shenanigans of early screen comedy in the vein of Buster Keaton and the Marx...

Mar 5, 2021 — When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark died in 2015 at age seventy-five from myelodysplastic syndrome, she left behind a vast and varied five-decade trail of portraits and documentary pictures, collected in twenty books and dozens of exhibitions, radical in their...

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Feb 9, 2021 — What does parallax mean? It is a term that English speakers are perpetually learning and always forgetting. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses: “Parallax. I never exactly understood . . . Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” In the technical sense, the word...

Feb 5, 2021 — This week we’re reading Nick Pinkerton on Fassbinder’s problems with Chabrol and revisiting films by Marguerite Duras, Lizzie Borden, and Béla Tarr.