The Test

Nov 5, 2019 — What began as an artificially stoked-up controversy has led to a vital statement on the present and future of cinema.

Aug 13, 2021 — This week we’re reading about the first and second waves of noir and taking a good look at a smartly dressed man.

Feb 11, 2008 — Though today he is most fondly remembered for his later romantic comedies, typifying Hollywood filmmaking in its heyday, it should be known that Ernst Lubitsch was also a pioneer of the modern movie musical.

Jun 18, 2024 — We’re diving deeper this month into a new Elaine May biography and memoirs from Susan Seidelman and Griffin Dunne.

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...

May 31, 2019 — Chinese poets and American and English novelists figure prominently in this week’s round.

Feb 2, 2018 — Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories opens today at the Metrograph and runs through February 15. “Programmer Nellie Killian’s selections, which span more than three decades and a wide range of documentary styles, include fascinating titles by directors with a...

Jul 17, 2017 — “Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles,” reports Anita Gates...

May 22, 2017 — Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer “makes the absurd, amazing The Lobster seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison,” declares Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “A film of clean hands, cold heart, and near-Satanic horror, it...