An Easy Girl

Jul 7, 2021 — In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai—or the global art-house phenomenon they generated—without these extraordinary performers;...

Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...

Jul 31, 2017 — What is the defining characteristic of the femme fatale? Critic Imogen Sara Smith explores the range of this film noir archetype through a handful of classic performances.

Nov 20, 2014 — The two writers chat about Nehme’s new novel.

May 26, 2026 — Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female...

May 30, 2025 — The director discusses her path from neuroscience to cinema and the childhood memory that inspired her short August Visitor, a film about culture and intergenerational understanding.

Feb 18, 2020 — From the making of Chinatown, through fresh memoirs and ongoing biographies, here’s this month’s overview of new and noteworthy titles.

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...

Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.