A Beautiful Star

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Apr 7, 2020 — Before the 1990s, the era when the power centers of fashion began to be much more numerous and dispersed, decades could be easily identified by the most prominent looks and cuts of their pervasive styles. The closet of the sixties...

Jul 29, 2019 — The late Dutch actor worked with directors as varied as Paul Verhoeven, Ermanno Olmi, Ridley Scott, and Nicolas Roeg.

Feb 19, 2019 — A master at adapting literary classics for the screen, Luchino Visconti made a bold choice in emphasizing the homoerotic undertones in Thomas Mann’s novella.

Nov 27, 2018 — With The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles created a model of period filmmaking, lightly deploying historical signifiers while focusing on the haunting power of his actors’ faces.

Nov 19, 2018 — Billy Wilder proves himself one of cinema’s greatest pleasure seekers in this irresistible confection, a landmark of Hollywood comedy.

Nov 18, 2018 — This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

Aug 21, 2018 — A mythic piece of early Finnish cinema gets reimagined in the short film The Moonshiners, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Jul 23, 2018 — Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut will premiere out of competition. And Venice Critics’ Week announces its 2018 lineup.

Feb 22, 2018 — Bengali cinema icon Uttam Kumar stars as a matinee idol on the brink of failure in this deeply introspective meditation on art and fame.