Past Performance

May 2, 2019 — The new issue features essays on work by Joanna Hogg and Olivier Assayas and a celebration of its publisher’s fiftieth anniversary.

Feb 26, 2019 — He gave us some of the greatest musicals ever made and followed up with winning comedies, romances, and thrillers.

Dec 20, 2018 — New York launches an Iranian film festival and sends its Art of the Real series to Los Angeles.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Dec 10, 2018 — Alfonso Cuarón’s latest scores best film awards from critics’ groups in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Toronto.

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Oct 29, 2018 — Supporting roles bring potent flavor to classic Hollywood’s darkest genre. In the first installment of a series, Imogen Sara Smith pays tribute to the queen of character actors: Thelma Ritter.

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.