All of a Sudden

Mar 15, 2022 — The story of queerness in American cinema isn’t complete without the unusual case of These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961). Both films are based on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, inspired by an incident in which...

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

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 4, 2021 — Mills winningly enlivens the old tropes of a story we’ve seen a thousand times before.

Sep 9, 2021 — Critics find Kristen Stewart to be “both such a counterintuitive and oddly apt choice” for the role of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Jun 14, 2021 — Postwar Hollywood’s quintessential heavy wields his signature mix of brutality and neurosis to embody an abusive husband in Max Ophuls’s psychological drama.

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.

Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...

Oct 7, 2020 — One Scene I have a very precise memory of watching The Game for the first time, of sitting on the couch in the family room of my childhood home, inserting the VHS tape, and being totally taken in. At the...