The Key

Jul 29, 2024 — MoMA presents seven recent restorations, including films by Victor Sjöström, Howard Hawks, and Frank Borzage.

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

Feb 23, 2023 — Notes on new features from Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Margarethe von Trotta, and Volker Koepp.

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Mar 13, 2020 — Maybe in tough times we can draw strength from our passion for great cinema.

Oct 15, 2019 — After breaking through in Medium Cool, Forster floundered until Quentin Tarantino plucked him from undeserved obscurity nearly thirty years later.

Nov 14, 2018 — He transformed a fledgling comic book publisher into a juggernaut brand.

Feb 2, 2018 — For nearly a decade now, the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville has been a low-key event of high significance to the world of music. Writing about the 2016 edition in the New York Times, Ben Ratliff noted that it “has...

Jan 22, 2018 — “In The Tale, an early critical favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and a drama of uncommonly troubling power, Laura Dern plays Jennifer Fox, a documentary filmmaker trying to remember an experience that befell her at the age of...