Circles

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

Jan 5, 2021 — The director overcame anti-Semitism or misogyny to make such unique films as Hester Street and Chilly Scenes of Winter.

Dec 29, 2020 — Alongside the traditional top tens, critics are offering imaginative pairings and lists of the best audiovisual essays and title sequences of the year.

Nov 30, 2020 — Cuban cinema has no present-day champion more devoted than Luciano Castillo. As the director of the Cinemateca de Cuba, an organization formed in 1960 by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in order to protect and promote...

Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Nov 20, 2020 — Standing before his friend Basil Hallward’s portrait of him, the paint barely dry, Dorian Gray implores to some unseen force: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old . ....

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

Oct 1, 2020 — Bill Murray and Rashida Jones star in a father-daughter caper set in pre-COVID New York.

Sep 29, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 What can it mean for cinema to be revolutionary? Answering a version of this question in a 1977 interview, the Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solás stressed the importance of real-world context. In a capitalist...