The We and the I

Feb 8, 2022 — A Prohibition-era gangster saga, the Coen brothers’ third feature is an enigmatic fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease.

Nov 30, 2021 — Lost films are not the only tragedy of the silent age. It’s time that we counted up all the forgotten stories, and the overlooked connections as well. The truth is that lost films and lost memories can’t be separated. One...

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

Nov 5, 2021 — A teenage girl looks on with both envy and disapproval as her mother shimmies on the dance floor in the arms of a lover. “Beautiful,” observes a friend. “I know,” says the daughter, bitterly, before falling asleep in her nanny’s...

Oct 19, 2021 — The Academy Award–winning director remembers a formative and eye-opening encounter with Lynne Ramsay’s feature debut.

Sep 23, 2021 — Gina Prince-Bythewood’s iconic debut portrays Black love without forcing its heroine to compromise herself and her ambitions.

Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.

Aug 10, 2021 — Hirokazu Kore-eda’s international breakthrough is a bittersweet meditation on mortality, memory, and the movies.

May 27, 2021 — First Person I first watched Yi Yi on a busted cassette tape, in my small Texas town, rented from a Blockbuster behind a rice field and a pharmacy. If you were a high schooler growing up just outside of Houston...

May 19, 2021 — For the last twenty years—until the pandemic broke my streak—I drove each fall to spend a week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Before making the trip, I took care to avoid reading anything about the subjects, characters, or...