The Reading

May 11, 2020 — This week’s round comes loaded with lists: 100 novels about cinema, fifty novelizations, and dozens of Sheila O’Malley’s favorite biographies.

Mar 31, 2020 — Everybody loves Show Boat, but where is the love for the woman whose name alone sits above the title in James Whale’s dazzling 1936 film version? Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist for decades, and in her peak years also...

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

Dec 20, 2019 — This week we’re spotlighting directors’ and writers’ appreciations of other directors and writers, plus Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda.

Sep 13, 2019 — Nicholas Britell’s scores are so finely calibrated to the movies they inhabit that they become inextricable from the images on-screen. Whether it’s the staccato heartbeat of orchestral strings in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight or the mix of piano motifs and hip-hop...

May 6, 2019 — Greta Garbo, Anita Loos, Ernst Lubitsch, Ben Hecht, and Salka Viertel cross paths in this month’s round.

Feb 5, 2018 — The World of Apu is a new multi-lingual, bimonthly online film magazine whose first issue appeared last November. The new second issue features Rafaella Britto on Satyajit Ray’s “most gloomy film,” The Goddess (1960), K Balamurugan on Shanjey Kumar Perumal’s...

Dec 19, 2017 — From 1970 to 1976, Joseph McBride played a film critic in Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, which Netflix plans to have completed and released next year. But he doesn’t just play one onscreen. McBride’s a critic, reporter,...

Dec 6, 2017 — “There’s topical, there’s timely, and then there’s The Post, which feels less like a historical thriller set in 1971 than it does an exhilarating caricature of the year 2017,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “While Steven Spielberg’s latest film rivetingly...

Nov 14, 2017 — Donna Deitch combined tropes of lesbian pulp romance with the sheen of mainstream filmmaking in her beloved debut feature.