The Search

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Jul 10, 2009 — In the epic table talk à clef that is My Dinner with André, André, a theater director (played by theater director André Gregory), tells his old friend Wally (played by playwright and actor Wallace Shawn) about a long journey he...

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Sep 6, 1999 — The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my...

Mar 29, 1999 — Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits was the most critically well-received children’s film in nearly two decades—and also the most challenging and rewarding fantasy-adventure movie since Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, released forty-one years earlier. At the dawn of the 1980s,...

Dec 3, 1984 — Since the dawn of the sound era, an estimated 25,000 feature-length films have been produced—and that’s in the English language alone. When, in the early 1960s, an international group of film critics were polled as to their “number-one film of...

Charles Yu is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the prix Médicis étranger. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications including the New Yorker,...

Feb 27, 2023 — Among the highlights this month is a series celebrating Oscar nominee Michelle Yeoh, an international star who began her career as one of Hong Kong cinema’s fiercest action heroes.

May 24, 2019 — In the spotlight this week: Barbara Rubin, Chantal Akerman, Kenji Mizoguchi, Dominik Graf, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

Nov 15, 2018 — In two made-for-television productions, a middle-aged Ingmar Bergman blurred the boundaries between screen and stage.