The Chemist

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

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...

Feb 21, 2019 — Repertory Picks In his first decade in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock landed on the perfect balance between swooning romance and intricately layered suspense with Notorious, a film whose moral ambiguity hinted at the increasingly complex material of his subsequent masterpieces. Propelled...

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

May 23, 2017 — “For ardent Hong Sangsoo fans, 2017 couldn’t be a more rewarding year,” writes Bradley Warren at the Playlist. “Not just because the South Korean filmmaker has three new films ready—the first, On the Beach at Night Alone, launched in Berlin—or...

Apr 12, 2016 — Howard Hawks’s 1939 aviation classic Only Angels Have Wings is an exemplar of the auteurist Hollywood entertainer’s capability to fuse “a personal existential statement and a delightful piece of showmanship.”

Jul 29, 2025 — Mystery, intrigue, and illicit passion thrive in one of America’s most complex and expansive cities, captured in all of its glory in such crime thrillers as Out of Sight, Miami Vice, and China Moon.

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...

Nov 10, 2020 — The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many...

Aug 24, 2020 — In memory of D. A. Pennebaker (1925–2019) 1. The great documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was motivated to shoot by curiosity. He loved music and friendship, and he had an understanding that everything he filmed recorded histories both personal and...