The Theme

Oct 20, 2020 — Despite the preponderance of tales of coming of age and sexual awakening in American independent cinema, it’s still rare to encounter a movie that deals with experiences of intimacy between young LGBT characters in a way that feels honest, candid,...

Aug 24, 2020 — “Temporal pincers” aside, this two-and-a-half-hour puzzler may be easier to follow than you might expect.

Jul 3, 2020 — One Scene By 2008, Olivier Assayas was perhaps best known as a director of fraught, emotionally intense, experimentally structured thrillers such as Irma Vep (1996), demonlover (2002), and Boarding Gate (2007), so the contemplative quiet of the feature he released...

Jun 15, 2020 — The eye contact, the exhilarating anxiety of sharing private tastes, the power of knowing what you want and summoning up the courage to ask for it: in case you can’t tell, I’m talking about the once-upon-a-time experience of renting a...

Dec 11, 2019 — One Scene “Who can prove the genuineness of our feelings?” a character asks at one point in the Cannes-award-winning sci-fi drama Little Joe, the first English-language film by Austrian director Jessica Hausner. The question is as good a summation as...

Nov 29, 2019 — Since its debut in 2003, the online film publication Reverse Shot has found playful and provocative ways of blurring the boundaries between presumed opposites. With their tradition of symposiums—collections of newly commissioned essays on various topics and questions in film...

Jul 2, 2019 — Father-child relationships come into focus in this week’s Short and Feature pairing on the Criterion Channel, which examines the trauma of coming of age with an emotionally unstable parent. Presented with Víctor Erice’s El Sur, Charles Williams’s All These Creatures follows...

Apr 26, 2019 — A politically engaged actor who refused to be commodified, this French icon showcased her piercing intelligence throughout four decades of unforgettable performances.

Apr 2, 2018 — Updates are still coming into the first entry on this year’s New Directors/New Films running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This entry will take us all the way through...

Mar 12, 2018 — After Paula Prentiss, who’s recently turned eighty, had a nervous breakdown on the set of What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), she “didn’t turn up in another movie until Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1970), by which time Hollywood had changed to the point...