NightClub

Dec 4, 2020 — Forty years after her death, people still imitate Mae West’s voice: that slinky contralto drawl that hit each Brooklyn-inflected vowel like a cab driver leaning on his horn. The voice would be memorable even if she had by some wild...

Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

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 5, 2020 — One of the most vital showcases of new nonfiction work is now on through Sunday.

Feb 27, 2020 — Hong Sang-soo’s The Woman Who Ran and Philippe Garrel’s The Salt of Tears premiere in the festival’s main competition.

Sep 30, 2019 — Critics are enthralled by a mobster’s three-and-a-half-hour alternative history of the mid-twentieth century.

Sep 4, 2019 — The late actor became an icon of his generation with this moody, brilliant non-performance, informed by his intimate knowledge of chaos and death.

Jun 13, 2019 — Over the course of their ten films together, the fleet-footed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers took many memorable spins. But their dancing in Swing Time, the sublime 1936 musical that marked their sixth pairing, is a cut above. “I think...