The House of the Spirits

Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...

Feb 28, 2014 — The Great Beauty, which is up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Academy Awards, feels at times like a glorious throwback to a time when art-house cinema reigned. Feeling nostalgic for that era, when films by the great directors of world...

Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...

Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.

May 19, 2026 — New films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and James Gray are riding high on the Cannes critics’ grids.

May 22, 2025 — The jury honors tales of haunted appliances, an exiled community, and a life-changing diagnosis.

Feb 18, 2022 — This week we’re celebrating pioneers of queer cinema and reading about Melville, Menelik Shabazz, Patrick Wang, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Apr 19, 2021 — What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics....

Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...

Nov 9, 2020 — Critics find the story behind the writing of Citizen Kane steeped in all the glory and sleaze of Old Hollywood.