A Place in the World

Jun 5, 2026 — Despite what is often assumed about the history of trans representation in cinema, it is not a simple story of marginalization and stigmatization. In their 2024 book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, critics...

Jul 3, 2024 — Pop Shakespeare, 100 years of Disney, and conversations with Isaac Julien and Steven Soderbergh are among this week’s highlights.

Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.

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.

May 5, 2022 — Has Asian American cinematic representation really reached unprecedented heights, as almost all recent film coverage on the subject claims? In the past two years, critics’ polls, New York Times features, and Golden Globes scandals have marked the newfound success of...

Oct 27, 2021 — Stephen Winter’s subversive, imaginative work simultaneously celebrates Black queer culture and fiercely threatens cinematic and societal conventions. In conversation as in his work, the director, producer, and writer deftly balances a warm wit with strikingly incisive honesty. Winter has played...

Sep 21, 2021 — Johnnie To pays homage to Akira Kurosawa in this martial arts drama about the virtue of struggle and self-improvement.

May 18, 2021 — The 1892 Chinese novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai opens with a prologue in which the author, Han Ziyun, writes from his own perspective, providing a gateway into the book by describing a dream he has had. Referring to himself...

Jul 6, 2020 — Songbook In the blue moonlight of a humid December night, an escape is underway. A man in army fatigues runs from an open-air cell with a rolled-up rug in one hand and a sword in the other, stolen from someone...

Oct 16, 2019 — This month’s round includes new critical assessments of Bresson and Rohmer, Hollywood memoirs, and interviews with living legends.