The Reading

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

Feb 5, 2020 — Performances Judy Davis chomps softly into Naked Lunch: into twisted behavior, into the nuanced meat of the moment, into the juicy black center of the psychic abyss. Bombed-out but supernally alert and incongruously amused, she injects a syringe into her...

Oct 15, 2019 — Born in Denmark to a wealthy family in 1879, Benjamin Christensen dropped out of medical school to receive training as an opera singer, only to lose his singing voice to what was diagnosed as an incurable nervous illness. He then...

Jul 16, 2019 — When Alan J. Pakula began preparing for the production of Klute (1971), he screened a lot of Alfred Hitchcock films. He looked at Notorious and admired Ingrid Bergman’s work. He revisited Strangers on a Train, struggling with the climactic merry-go-round...

Apr 2, 2019 — Mike Leigh’s endless fascination with human behavior is palpable in every one of the films he’s made over the course of his nearly fifty-year career. With an acute sensitivity to rhythm, character, and setting, he extracts extraordinary moments from the...

Jan 9, 2019 — There’s a certain tall-tale quality to Sandi Tan’s life. When the California-based filmmaker was growing up in Singapore in the 1980s and ’90s, movies were a powerful way of experiencing the world beyond her small native country, a place she...

Nov 9, 2015 — “When you feel loved, you’re liable to do some of your better work,” says Gena Rowlands in a new interview for Academy Originals, a web video series produced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The incomparable actress,...

Oct 14, 2015 — Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Add to that list of great on-screen duos the Italian movie legends Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, who appeared in more than ten films together. Their 1977 film, A Special...

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Aug 25, 2014 — Love and death tango in Bob Fosse’s glittering ode to his own mortality.