The Great Passage

May 5, 2023 — Along with an interview with Straub-Huillet, we’re reading a Taiwanese wuxia primer and assessments of work by Shinji Somai and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Feb 14, 2023 — This month’s roundup opens with an appreciation of Preston Sturges and wraps with a book launch serving donuts and damn fine coffee.

Nov 22, 2022 — Spike Lee’s transcendent portrait of an American hero is an urgent call for the nation to live up to everything it claims to be.

Oct 22, 2021 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. Americans have long been encouraged to buy into the...

Sep 13, 2021 — Audrey Diwan, Jane Campion, and Maggie Gyllenhaal take home top awards.

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

Mar 19, 2021 — We’ve been watching and reading about films by Cecilia Mangini, Cheryl Dunye, Claire Denis, and Nina Menkes.

Jul 14, 2020 — We’d hoped to be making and watching movies in theaters again by now. That’s not happening, so now what?

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...

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...